Exploring the Organizational Context around Agile Software Delivery

Abstract

Agile management has revealed itself as a management approach that copes with an unclear product scope and fast-changing circumstances. This approach has gained popularity by projects in fast changing environments, such as the information technology (IT) industry. Nevertheless, many companies that adopted agile methods are still structured according to a traditional, non-agile form of organization. Projects with an agile project management approach embedded in a non-agile organization might face numerous difficulties. What these difficulties exactly encompass is not fully understood yet and therefor this research strives to fulfil the following objective: “Explore the interaction between agile project management and its organizational context.”
In this way this research aims to contribute to literature about the implementation of agile within an organization. Next to that, this research provides insight to organizations about how an organization is best aligned with agile. This research uses the term software delivery, since this includes projects as well as on-going activities. This results in the following research question: “What kind of adjustments can an organization make to better facilitate agile software delivery?”
The literature study resulted in a compilation of eleven aspects that are relevant to examine the interaction between agile software delivery and the organizational context. These aspects are used as guidance during the interviews. The interaction of agile with the organizational context is discussed with the interviewees in relation to these eleven aspects, in that way creating an image of the alignment of agile within the organization.
Multiple commonalities are observed over the different cases. Interpretation of the results of the cross-case analysis resulted in three patterns.
The first pattern shows how organizations tend to focus on team level when implementing agile and have the tendency to neglect the organizational adjustments around teams. The organizational surrounding is in this research described as the governance structure around the teams and includes the division of tasks, responsibilities and other governance mechanisms. Several of the interview observations can be explained by an insufficient adjustment of the governance structure.
A second pattern is to what extend agile is understood and how it is interpreted. Some of the interview observations can be explained by an insufficient understanding of agile. Adjustment of the governance structure around the software delivery teams should be aligned with agile concepts.
The third pattern shows that several observations can be explained by the fact that change needs time. Every organization undertakes a transition when implementing agile software delivery to change the governance structure and to understand agile. Alignment of agile within the organization depends on the stage an organization is in during this transition.
Based on these patterns, this research concludes that an organization could consider adjusting its governance structure to better facilitate agile software delivery. When making these adjustments, a sufficient understanding of agile is required to ensure that adjustments of the governance structure are aligned with agile software delivery. Next to that, the implementation of agile and the adjustments of the governance structure can be considered as a transition that needs to be managed pro-actively.