Agile Transformation: A Summary and Research Agenda from the First International Workshop

In order to increase their ability to sense, respond and learn, organisations are up-scaling their use of agile. This implies that agile is used not only in larger projects and programs, but also in other organisational units outside of IT. In a foreword to the book "Unlocking Agility" [1], Bjarte Bogsnes writes: "The agile mindset is now finding its way into the C-suite, and it is starting to radically change the way organizations are led and managed. Business agility is on everybody´s lips, for very good reasons". While the implementation of agile methods traditionally has been studied at team level ( [2], [3]), 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 ( [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10]); second, changes in roles and practices that occur during such transformations ( [11], [12], [13]); and third, models for understanding agile transformations ( [14], [15]). 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 in order to focus research on practice in a field which receives great attention. This paper summarises the workshop, which was conducted in half a day at the International Conference on Agile Software Development, XP 2019. 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 transformations, as there are growing opportunities to study them as companies increasingly adopt agile. Organisations are learning from agile practice to embrace agility in their ways of working; agile practitioners can also benefit from the wider context of organisations undergoing agile transformations, to understand their wider implications, and how to sustain them. The workshop received six submissions out of which four were selected for presentation. Maria Paasivaara was invited to give a keynote talk on tips for successful agile transformations. Following the presentations, participants offered definitions of agile transformation and discussed, in an open space format, the main research challenges in this area.

The remainder of this paper reports the results of the workshop, and is structured as follows. Section 2 presents the definitions of large-scale agile transformation from participants. Section 3 provides an outline of the four presentations and of the keynote. Section 4 provides an overview of key research challenges identified by the participants at the workshop and at a similar workshop in London. Section 5 concludes the paper.

What is an agile transformation?

For many organisations moving towards business agility is challenging as there are many elements at play, from culture and leadership to process and tools. 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 improve 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”

Lucas Green presented an industry case study of a big bang transformation with processes as usual having to coexist with new processes and resulting challenges; a

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