“Agile Adoption” in IT Companies - Building a Change Capability by Qualitative Description of Agile Implementation in Different Companies

Is agile the latest management fad? A review of success factors of agile transformations

“…Another major issue which arose within this category was that a change in management style toward servant leadership (Johnston and Gill, 2017; Moravcová and Legény, 2016; Smart, 2018) and an introduction of more decentralized decision-making processes (Mancin, 2016; Denning, 2016; Paasivaara et al , 2018) are important changes to be made. Here, an interesting discrepancy between different studies emerged: while some articles only focused on the need to give employees increased autonomy (Dikert et al , 2016; Denning, 2018a; Smart, 2018), Birkinshaw (2018) stressed the need to balance this autonomy with a healthy level of remaining centralized decision-making.…”

“…While the precise contents of the pieces of training beyond agile methods are rarely touched upon by the source articles, other studies provide valuable clues as they emphasize the increased need for specific competencies. For example, Moravcová and Legény (2016) identified an increase in demand for social, analytical and presentation skills of developers. Table 3 depicts all success factors identified within the “employees” category.…”

“…Furthermore, as Moravcová and Legény (2016) mention, the introduction of agile breaks existing company rules and structures, which is a potential source of discontent, and thus needs to be addressed proactively. The different success factors within the “culture” group are portrayed in Table 7.…”

“…Most other factors within this category emphasize the organizational aspects of teams within an agile organization, such as their location (Campanelli et al , 2017; Nuottila et al , 2016), size (Kim et al , 2016) and members (Moravcová and Legény, 2016; Paterek, 2018). All success factors within the “team” category are displayed in Table 8.…”

“…The category of “operational processes” presents a number of success factors which generally address the need to adapt the organization’s processes (Moravcová and Legény, 2016; Orłowski et al , 2017; Nuottila et al , 2016) or refer to various stages of development projects (Jovanović et al , 2017; Orłowski et al , 2017). Notable exceptions are provided by Campanelli et al (2017), who states the need to involve customers more intensively and Ali (2016) and Pries-Heje and Krohn (2017), who address that new agile processes have to be synchronized with existing waterfall ones.…”