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Members of the Agile Research Network in collaboration with a researcher from Sintef, Norway, organised the First International Workshop on Agile Transformation, at XP2019, Montreal, May 2019.

In order to increase their ability to sense, respond and learn, organisations are up-scaling their use of agile. Agile ways of working are used in larger projects and also in organisational units outside IT. The first international workshop on agile transformation, aimed to focus research on practice in a field which currently receives great attention.

While the implementation of agile methods traditionally has been studied at team level, adopting agile practices across the organisation is widening this perspective and has been labelled “agile transformation”. Research has discussed three main areas of such transformations. First, challenges and success factors in the transformation process; second, changes in roles and practices that occur during such transformations; and third, models for understanding agile transformations. As an emerging research field, there are many understandings of what agile transformation is; also, current empirical studies tend to be descriptive and place little emphasis on theory to explain findings. This was the motivation to host the first international workshop on agile transformation.

The goal of the workshop was to challenge the scientific community to identify what should be of prime interest to researchers in the area of agile transformation, as there are growing opportunities to study them as companies increasingly adopt agile .

The participants in the workshop proposed different definitions for agile transformation as shown below; the terms ‘culture’, ‘reactive/responsiveness to change’ and ‘continuous improvement’ figured in several of them.

Table 1. Some of the definitions of agile transformation gathered at the workshop.

“an individual’s, team’s, group’s and organisation’s journey into continuous improvements changing the way we do business, meet our goals and overcome our challenges by being more flexible, targeting smaller goals and providing continuous delivery, feedback and learning the process which evolves an organisation to be more reactive to changes in its environment”

“digital transformation -> agile becomes larger (programs, portfolios) and more important; also becomes more complex, needs alignment with other units that are not traditionally agile; change in leadership and management”

“a people-centred approach to improving business outputs in the context of its environment the process undertaken to develop capabilities that will allow for flexibility in responding to a changing environment and continuous improvement”

“a path from adopting agile practices to establishing agile culture”

“transform from rather rigid structures, processes and hierarchy to a more network organisation with increased knowledge, understanding and collaboration across boundaries to im- prove a company’s reaction to external change in order to improve performance referring to effectiveness”

“shift towards practices that enable organisational responsiveness”

“agile – iterative, incremental, collaborative, effects/results/outcomes-driven transformation – continuous improvement from where you are towards the Agile values and principles”

Participants also ranked their motivation for agile transformation after a scale taken from the state of agile survey[1]; the top three reasons were: ‘improve business/IT alignment’, ‘enhance ability to managing changing priorities’ and ‘accelerate software delivery’;

Participants were also asked to rank success factors and challenges presented (slightly modified from [1], based on own knowledge of transformation projects. They ranked the top three success factors to be: ‘changing organisational culture’, ‘leadership’ and ‘engaging people’. The top three Challenges were: ‘Hierarchical management and organizational boundaries’, ‘Integrating non-development functions’ and ‘resistance to change.

This was a very successful workshop with attendants wanting us to repeat it in future conference. This workshop showed that the research community is interested in continuing studies on agile transformations, and that there is a growing body of studies on which to build up. We hope the initial research agenda developed at the workshop will inspire future studies.

[1]       K. Dikert, M. Paasivaara, and C. Lassenius, “Challenges and success factors for large-scale agile transformations: A systematic literature review,” J. Syst. Softw., vol. 119, pp. 87–108, 2016.

[1] https://www.stateofagile.com

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Teams here.

Download the white paper on Remote working in an Agile team here.

We presented a paper entitled “Strategies for doing Agile in a non-Agile Environment” in ESEM’16 in Ciudad Real, Spain in September. Free full text version is available here.

An interesting and highly interactive session took place on 14th December 2015 at Milton Keynes popular Agile group Agile:MK.

The group used Ketso (a toolkit for creative engagement that provides a structured way to run a workshop) to explore strategies, solutions, and tactics for trying to be Agile in a non-Agile environment.

See more about Agile:MK here and more about Ketso here

The DSDM and UX Design Pocket Book, co-authored by Helen Sharp, Laura Plonka, Peggy Gregory, Katie Taylor, and Mike Rowlands is now available.

Published by the DSDM Consortium, the pocket book can be purchased from the DSDM Web Shop. Click here for further details.

This is the White Paper from our second case study.This case study presents the story of one organisation’s challenges when integrating Agile into a wider organisational structure that is not Agile.  The White paper describes the challenges they faced, working practices adopted and the lessons learned from their experiences of using Agile in a non-Agile environment.

Do you use agile approaches? We are interested in working with you on challenges that you are facing.

What other collaborators say about working with us:

“It’s early days yet but we’re really pleased to be working with the ARN. It can be difficult to get an objective view of day-to-day working, but we can already see that, because ARN have been in to talk to us, people are sharing more information about the problem than they did before.”

Find out more about work with us or contact us DSDM-agile-research-network@open.ac.uk.