Investigating Large-Scale Agile Transformation Approaches: A Multiple-Case Study

Motivation

With the advent of the digital era and the resulting volatile market environments, traditional companies face several challenges. These include shorter time-to-market cycles, continuously changing customer needs, and new technological advances. Enterprise agility is a popular concept for coping with these uncertain market environments and is, therefore, a key factor for the success of companies. Thus, enterprise agility enables companies to recognize and react quickly to environmental changes. The use of innovative and agile methods is one way of tackling these problems and requirements. Although the use of agile practices was initially designed for projects with small, single, co-located teams, there is a discernible trend that an increasing number of large traditional companies are taking advantage of agile development. Accordingly, in-the-large adoption of agile practices often leads to challenges and problems, such as cross-team coordination or communication. Moreover, the widespread adoption of agile practices and methods often forces traditional companies to undertake a large-scale agile transformation.

Although there are already several publications that describe challenges and success factors that companies face in large-scale agile transformations, research in the field of large-scale agile transformation processes and related coaching and training approaches, as well as enterprise agility as a whole, is still scarce. Therefore, it is essential to continue the research to obtain comprehensive insights and thereby create a profound and holistic understanding that is of great interest to researchers and practitioners alike. Consequently, this thesis aims to contribute to this field of research employing a multi-case study of large-scale agile transformations in six large traditional enterprises from various industries. Therefore, an in-depth analysis of transformation approaches to implementing and adopting agile practices is conducted. The thesis's findings comprise three parts: First, the motivators that induce organizations to opt for large-scale transformations are examined. In the second part, the transformation processes and thus, the implementation approaches of the respective companies are analyzed. Finally, the impacts on the work system, as well as challenges and success factors in the context of agile change, are determined.

Research Questions