Industrial Agile Transformations Lacking Business Emphasis: Results from a Nordic Survey Study

In agile transformations, agile principles and practices are applied across the organization – ultimately for an agile enterprise. Such company-wide changes are not straightforward and there are research needs to understand how they are successfully conducted and sustained. We have recently done an industrial agile survey in Finland (2018) and in Sweden (2019). The findings suggest that there are many goals for companies to become (more) agile. Operational goals (productivity, quality) and responsiveness to customer/market changes are the most often reported ones, but higher-level business goals (new product development, new business innovations) appear to be less common. There are many ways to conduct agile transformations. Not all companies display a clear strategy. Operational goals appear to be more in focus than the business strategic ones and the overall agility of the company. Overall, our survey results suggest that companies put more emphasis on operational and organizational agility than business and enterprise agility. We suggest that each company should declare a clear purpose and well-defined business goals for the agile transformation.