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

agile transformations
Dag Naslund
Department of Management, Coggin College of Business, University of North
Florida, Jacksonville, Florida USA and Department of industrial management and Received 31 December 2019
Revised 29 May 2020
logistics, Lunds Universitet, Sweden, and Accepted 17 August 2020

Rahul Kale
Department of Management, University of North Florida, Jacksonville, Florida, USA

Abstract
Purpose – Agile is the new popular management change method and agile has lots of momentum. Management
consulting firms are promoting agile via articles and newsletters. While history does not repeat itself, it often
rhymes, and thus agile will probably be a successful change effort in some organizations. On the other hand, there is
a high probability that agile will not deliver the expected results for most organizations. History reveals that about
two-thirds of the change efforts are deemed unsuccessful – regardless of the actual change method. In this paper, we
present the results of a systematic literature review on agile and we compare and contrast it with other similar
organizational change methods. The purpose of this paper is to explore what one may learn from the history of the
earlier change methods in terms of how organizations may succeed in their agile efforts.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper is based on a structured literature review of the agile
concept – including agile transformation, and with a specific focus on critical success factors.
Findings – In addition to presenting the state of the art on agile in general, we identify, structure and
categorize critical success factors (CSF) for agile. From the 13 categories, we form three clusters, which
constitute a 3P framework (purpose, process and people). We also compare and contrast the CSF literature
regarding agile with CSFs for organizational change in general. history indicates that most organizational
change efforts are not successful. Based on the framework and the discussion, we provide recommendations
to hopefully increase the probability of successful agile implementations.
Originality/value – Given the relative novelty or at least the renewed interest in agile, a structured
literature review of the current status of this “new” method provides value as it may help organizations and
managers to not repeat old mistakes – once again.
Keywords Critical success factors, Transformational Leadership
Paper type Research paper

1. Introduction
Agile is the “new” popular management change method with lots of momentum.
Management consulting firms such as Accenture and McKinsey are promoting agile.
McKinsey, for instance, had three agile articles on the top 10 list for the year 2018. For the
topic “organization,” the top two articles were about agile and “agile is catching fire” is a
direct quote from a May 2019 article from McKinsey (Brosseau et al., 2019). Similarly, the
academic interest has grown as indicated by the increased number of published academic
articles over the past few years (Figure 1). Perhaps, most importantly, more and more International Journal of Quality
and Service Sciences
companies are now involved in transformation projects. “agile transformation is a high © Emerald Publishing Limited
1756-669X
priority for a rapidly increasing number of organizations” (De Smet et al., 2018). DOI 10.1108/IJQSS-12-2019-0142
IJQSS In this article, we first discuss key characteristics related to definitions of agile before
comparing agile to other organizational change methods. The main section is a presentation
of our findings regarding critical success factors (CSF) for agile, followed by an analysis and
concluding discussion.

1.1 What is agile?

Agile can mean different things to different people (Appelbaum et al., 2017). One main
confusion is whether agile belongs in the IT/IS/software field or if agile is a change method
to transform organizations. In the IT/IS/software field, agile is seen as a method to change
how projects are managed. Scrum, for example, is an increasingly popular approach for
agile IT/IS projects. In the transformation perspective, agile is not just for projects, but for
the entire organization. In this perspective, the basic principles behind agile are well known.
Agile organizations thrive in unpredictable and rapidly changing environments and key
characteristics include speed and flexibility. Agile is about the firm’s ability to quickly
adjust (Gligor et al., 2015) and to cater to specific customer expectations meaning that agile
organizations are more focused on being effective (Putnik and Putnik, 2012).

1.2 Agile and other recent change methods

Based on our literature review, we see no reason to believe that agile may be “significantly”
different from previous change methods. On the contrary, agile may very well be nothing
more than the latest change method, the new management fad. These management change
methods tend to follow the product life cycle as they diminish in popularity over time to
eventually be replaced by new methods (Näslund, 2013).
History and existing literature tell us that most “new” methods promoted by academics
and/or consultants tend to be a repackaged version of previously popular methods. In many
ways, lean is a new version of just in time (JIT) and six sigma is like total quality
management (TQM). While the current version of agile may not be a repackaged version of a
previous similar method, agile is not a new phenomenon either. Agile was first promoted as
agile manufacturing in the report “21st-century manufacturing enterprise strategy: an
industry-lead view” by Nagel and Dove (1991) (Putnik and Putnik, 2012). Then, it was
suggested as an alternate to the popular Japanese originated methods focused on efficiency
improvements. In another article almost 20 years ago, Power et al. (2001, p. 247) wrote:
The requirements for organizations to become more responsive to the needs of customers, the
changing conditions of competition and increasing levels of environmental turbulence are driving
interest in the concept of “agility.”
One could easily argue that agile is attractive for the same reasons today.

Figure 1.
Number of published
articles from 2008 to
2018
There is also a debate about the relationship between agile and the previously popular lean. Latest
Basically, three approaches exist: one is that they are mutually exclusive, one is that lean management
and agile are mutually supportive and finally one approach is that lean as an antecedent to
agility (Narasimhan et al., 2006; Inman et al., 2011). While no definite answers exist, most
fad
authors seem to agree with Putnik and Putnik (2012), who claim that lean and agile are
opposite and mutually exclusive concepts. They concluded that under the conditions of
stable and predictable environments, managers should choose lean, while under dynamic,
unpredictable and uncertain conditions, agile is a more applicable method.

1.3 Agile and experience/learning/knowledge of previous change methods

While history does not repeat itself, it often rhymes, and thus we can learn from history.
History tells us that while agile will probably be a successful change effort in some
organizations, yet, there is a high probability that agile will not deliver the expected results
for most organizations that now are starting their agile journey. History reveals that about
two-thirds of the change efforts are deemed unsuccessful – regardless of the actual method
(Näslund, 2008).
This suggests the agile transformation journey will not be easy for most organizations.
There are several differences between how traditional organizations are structured and how
they operate as opposed to agile organizations. Even though organizations have tried to
break away from the static, structural hierarchy with functional siloes for decades, few
organizations are truly structured after the cross-functional processes. The problem with
functional silos is hardly a new phenomenon. Drucker (1954) discussed the “great
operational divide” – the gap between operational and customer-facing employee groups –
half a century ago. Shapiro (1977) illustrated how the cultural differences between
marketing and operations cause silo problems. The value chain, as introduced by Porter
(1985), focuses on the horizontal flow of activities, rather than the vertical traditional silo
organizational structure. Hammer (1990), the re-engineering guru of the 1990s, discussed
how a radical process approach was needed to solve the functional silo dilemma. Now, agile
organizations try to solve the silo problem by operating networks of teams with rapid
learning and decision-making cycles (Brosseau et al., 2019).
Similarly, most well-established companies have focused on, and are structured for,
efficiency – not for being agile (Appelbaum et al., 2017). Here, again, the pendulum effect
comes in. During the past few decades, with six sigma and lean and even though some
would argue that both those methods were to some extent customer-focused, they were
mostly cost-cutting, incremental, functional improvement methods on the operational level
(Näslund, 2008). The six sigma and lean approaches are like TQM and JIT in the 1980s and
1990s when the pendulum also shifted to more process-oriented, drastic change illustrated
by reengineering/business process reenginering (BPR). Today with agile, the shift is again
to try to move away from the functional to the cross-functional, from efficiency to
effectiveness and flexibility, from static to responsive and so forth. This most likely would
be a journey with major challenges and setbacks along the way for most organizations
(Gulati, 2007).
In addition, there is not a “single cookbook recipe” for how to become agile. In their
approach, McKinsey (Brosseau et al., 2019) state that some organizations are born agile and
for others, there are three main paths: all-in, step-wise and emergent, bottom-up approach.
Obviously, the research is very limited on which, if any, approach works better and if so, for
some or all types of organizations. The purpose of this paper is, therefore, to investigate the
current status of agile – with a specific focus on the critical success factors (CSF). The idea is
IJQSS furthermore to compare and reflect on the current research on agile CSF with the more
general ideas of CSF for organizational change and transformation.
In the following sections, we first present the methodology followed for our structured
literature review for agile. Then, from the literature review, we detail the CSFs for agile
implementations. Based on similar previous work in the literature, we then categorize the
103 CSFs into 13 different categories. We follow this up with some important highlights of
each of these categories. Next, based on previous research, we then finally summarize these
13 categories into three distinct clusters and discuss their importance for the success of agile
implementation efforts. We then conclude the article by presenting our thoughts on the
prerequisites for successful implementation by reflecting on the previous change methods
and the future for agile transformation efforts.

2. Methodology
We conducted several structured literature reviews regarding agile transformations. The
first search, using the ABI/INFORM Global database, indicates that the number of
published articles using the term “agile” in the title has more than doubled over the past 10
years. Furthermore, of the 511 published articles, over 40% of the articles are published in
the past three years. Thus, we can confirm that the topic is getting increasingly popular.
The 511 articles were published in 193 different journals (list available upon request).
Even though the topic, thus, is published in a wide variety of journals, publications related
to IS/IT/software are dominating. The top three journals (109 articles) are software journals.
Similarly, six of the top 10 journals and 13 of the top 20 are related to IS/IT/software.
Furthermore, almost 50% of the articles (249) are published in the top 20 journals. In other
words, only 10% of the journals publish a vast majority of the articles and these journals are
predominantly IS/IT/software journals. On the other hand, we do see an increasing interest
also in the more managerial areas.
To identify CSF, we conducted several different searches (Table 1). We used Google
Scholar to search for articles including conference papers as the number of published
articles in journals was limited. First, we searched for articles where the title of the article
included the word “agile” and one of the keywords “organization,” “transformation” and
“change.” This search resulted in 207 articles. Via different rounds of scanning for relevance,
we could eventually narrow the number of articles to 19 articles. In the review of these 19
articles (snowballing), we could identify four more articles for a total of 23 articles dealing
with critical success factors. We identified a total of 103 CSF and we counted how often the
factors were mentioned.
In the second round of analysis, we used various previous groupings of agile
transformation by Dikert et al. (2016) and Campanelli et al. (2017) to categorize and structure
the CSF. We also extended their work by combining factors related to the same aspect of the
agile transformation into 13 categories. We finally structured the 13 categories into three
clusters (based on Näslund, 2013). In the following sections, we present the results of this

Table 1. Step Description No. of articles

Transformation
1 Initial search result 207
planning success 2 After initial scanning 112
factors with the 3 After scanning of abstracts 36
number of 4 In-depth review 19
observations 5 Including additional articles 23
literature review and we discuss the identified CSF, success factor categories and final Latest
clusters. management
fad
2.1 Most frequently mentioned critical success factor
To provide an initial overview, Figure 2 displays the success factors, which were
mentioned at least five times. One interesting observation is that the most frequently
mentioned success factors are almost all related to the “people” or “culture” issues
regarding the implementation of agile. Apart from the managerial ones (e.g. top
management support and management style), which obviously could be regarded as
people/culture issues, the CSF all concern how to increase engagement and motivation
of the employees via training, coaching and a mindset and culture shift. Any
organizational transformation that involves numerous individuals will face challenges.
While agile methods have been in use for years, there are many obstacles that
organizations have faced, including but not limited to change resistance, lack of
motivation and lack of investment (Dikert et al., 2016). They mean that resistance can
exist on all levels from individuals to teams and managers. In organizations where the
change takes a bottom-up approach, management can become reluctant to change,
making significant organizational transformation above the team level impossible. On
the other hand, when the process is top-down, team members may feel as if it is a
mandate rather than a collaborative approach. Conboy et al. (2011) found that lack of
motivation was a challenge in companies where agile methods were adopted in a top-
down manner. Even if team members are capable, they may not be motivated to
collaborate if they do not understand the change and if they are not convinced the

Figure 2.
Critical success
factors with 5 or more
mentions
IJQSS methodology will be successful. Thus, training, coaching, engaging and motivating
employees is critical to transformation success.

3. Critical success factor categories

In the next step of our analysis, we grouped success factors into categories. Figure 3
presents the categories, ordered by their importance as defined by the number of times
success factors within this group were mentioned in the articles. As Figure 3 shows, the
success factor category which was mentioned the most throughout all 23 reviewed papers
was “management” success factors with a total of 37 mentions

3.1 Management
By far the largest category of success factors by the number of mentions in the
reviewed papers was the “management” group. While none of the success factors in this
category ranks among the four most mentioned factors overall, it is a wide variety of
issues, which characterize the “management” factors and which defines the importance
of this category.
The most frequently mentioned factor in this group is “top management buy-in and
support” (Dikert et al., 2016; Campanelli et al., 2017; Denning, 2016, 2018b; Smart, 2018;
Birkinshaw, 2018). Together with the factors emphasizing the need for transparent
communication of the agile transformation (Dikert et al., 2016) and the public support of the
transformation initiative (Dikert et al., 2016; Nuottila et al., 2016), this illustrates the
prominent role the top management plays in motivating employees for the agile
transformation.
Another major issue which arose within this category was that a change in management
style toward servant leadership (Johnston and Gill, 2017; Moravcova 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

Figure 3.
Critical success factor
categories by
importance
Changes in management style and decentralized decision-making 5
Latest
Communicate that change is non-negotiable 1 management
Communicate the change intensively, internally and to external stakeholders 4 fad
Convince employees that agile will bring the desired results 1
Create and communicate positive experiences in the beginning 2
Define concrete checkpoints for large scale changes in business direction 1
Empower employees to make their own decisions –> autonomy 3
Focus on innovation 2
Give employees the right balance of oversight and autonomy 1
Make management support visible 1
Make the change transparent 1
Management is educated on agile 3
Middle management has a clearly defined role in the transformation 1
Show strong commitment even if problems occur 2
Table 2.
Top management buy-in and support 6
Turn institutional skills into new products and businesses 1 Management success
Willingness to take risks 1 factors with the
Withstand external pressure to follow traditional waterfall processes 1 number of
37 observations

level of remaining centralized decision-making. All success factors in the “management”

category are depicted in Table 2.

3.2 Employees
As one of the major categories which emerged from this literature review, success factors
within the “employees” group were mentioned a total of 25 times, across a total of 12 single
success factors. By far the most frequently mentioned success factor across all factors, and
consequently also within this group, is the need to provide pieces of training for employees.
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, Moravcova 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.

3.3 Change leaders

The category “change leaders” refers to success factors which emphasize the need to
establish individuals and groups within the organization which have a positive attitude
toward agile methods, previous experience with agile (Dikert et al., 2016) and who are able to
provide coaching for less experienced employees (Paasivaara, 2017). Table 4 provides an
overview of the success factors identified in the category of change leaders:

3.4 Choosing and customizing the agile approach

The category “choosing and customizing the agile approach” represents success factors,
which are directly related to the implementation of agile methods in the company. Here,
especially the implementation of agile in a continuous and evolutionary way appears to be of
importance. Continuous integration, as a cornerstone of agile, is practiced at an
organizational level (Paasivaara, 2017), including specific agile principles for continuous
improvement which link problems to approaches (Mancin, 2016). Closely tied to this
continuous integration is the need to customize the agile approach to the individual context,
IJQSS which was also mentioned by multiple articles (Denning, 2016, 2018b; Dikert et al., 2016).
Table 5 provides a list of the success factors identified within the category.

3.5 Communication and collaboration

Communication and collaboration is a group of success factors, which refers to the
communication of the agile transformation to all stakeholders internally and externally, as
well as the fostering of collaboration within the organization. Specifically, the aim of the
organization is to become more open by sharing knowledge and information
(Campanelli et al., 2017). To facilitate this shift, new communication tools (Paasivaara et al.,
2018; Gupta et al., 2019) and processes (Campanelli et al., 2017; Dikert et al., 2016; Denning,

Ability to “go beyond standards” while improving effectiveness, quality and innovativeness 1
Ability to build trustworthy relationships 1
Decreased number of projects per one employee 1
Developers possess social, analytical, and presentation skills 1
Employee buy-in 1
Employees motivated to teamwork and knowledge sharing 1
Ensure availability of resources with engineering knowledge 2
Focused on acquiring and maintaining highly qualified employees 1
Table 3.
Increase in technical abilities and skills 1
Employees success Maintain motivation of employees in the new teams and roles 2
factors with the Provide pieces of training for employees 12
number of Resistance to change 1
observations 25

Table 4.
Establishing agile leadership and enablement teams 4
Transformation
Facilitate internal and external coaching 9
planning success Include persons with previous agile experience 2
factors with the Involving change agents and agile champions 5
number of Start with agile supporters 1
observations 21

Adapt agile practices to fit the individual context 2

Table 5. Check for legislative restrictions which might impair the use of agile methods 1
Choosing and Conform to a single agile approach 1
Continuous, evolutionary, step-by-step implementation and continuous learning 8
customizing the agile
Customize the agile approach carefully 1
approach success Find agile experienced pockets in the organization and learn from them 1
factors with the Keep it simple 1
number of Map to the old way of working to ease adaption 1
observations 16
2018b; Gupta et al., 2019) must be implemented during the transformation. The list of factors Latest
is presented in Table 6. management
fad
3.6 Culture
“Culture” as a success factor category is dominated by general calls to adapt the
organizational culture by implementing an agile mindset (Paterek, 2018; Mancin, 2016;
Dikert et al., 2016; Miller et al., 2017; Gupta et al., 2019; Denning, 2016). Perhaps, partly due to
its generality, the success factor “change organizational culture/create agile mindset” was
the second-most mentioned success factor overall, thus emphasizing the importance of the
culture shift necessary for the agile transformation.
Furthermore, as Moravcova 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.

3.7 Teams
The team is a category of success factors, which is at the touchpoint of the employee-related
factors and the organizational structure which is to be implemented during the agile
transformation. As the only success factor with multiple mentions, the need for project
teams to be able to self-organize (Paterek, 2018; Dikert et al., 2016; Mancin, 2016) is closely
tied to managers increasing employee autonomy.
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 (Moravcova and Legény, 2016; Paterek, 2018). All
success factors within the “team” category are displayed in Table 8.

3.8 Operational processes

The category of “operational processes” presents a number of success factors which
generally address the need to adapt the organization’s processes (Moravcova and Legény,

Arrange social events 1

Cherish agile communities 1 Table 6.
Engage everyone in the organization 1
Communication and
Implement new communication tools 2
Implementing new communication flow 4 collaboration success
Increased collaboration and transparency 4 factors with the
Knowledge sharing 1 number of
14 observations

Agile will change company “rules” and this needs to be managed well 1
Table 7.
Change of mindset of the workforce 2
Change organizational culture/create an agile mindset 9 Culture success
Concentrate on agile values 1 factors with the
Knowledge and expertise are recognized values of the organization 1 number of
14 observations
IJQSS 2016; Orłowski et al., 2017; Nuottila et al., 2016) or refer to various stages of development
projects (Jovanovic 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. Table 9 provides an overview of the success
factors in this group:

3.9 Role definition and deployment

While the category “role definition and deployment” only consists of three success factors,
and this is one of the smaller groups, it contains one of the most frequently mentioned
success factors. The “definition, alignment and communication of new roles for employees”
generally addresses the need to review and adapt existing roles and positions, often leading
to personal expectations of roles, which conflict with agile ideas (Nuottila et al., 2016).
The remaining success factors specifically address the roles of product owners
(Jovanovic et al., 2017; Dikert et al., 2016; Nuottila et al., 2016) and scrum master (Jovanovic
et al., 2017). All three success factors within this group are portrayed in Table 10.

3.10 Incentives and measures

The category of “incentives and measures” is a group of success factors, which were
mentioned by a single article each, and which point to the need of an organization to
consciously evoke agile-compliant behavior and to implement the corresponding
performance measures. Some of the identified success factors relate to the entire

Ensure business knowledge within development teams 1

Having development teams at the same location (no remote communication necessary) 1
Implement distributed teams 1
Integrate team management within the team 1
Keeping teams small in size 1
Leaders representing values of effective and innovative teamwork are part of the team 1
Project team engagement 1
Table 8.
Project teams can self-organize 4
Teams success Subject matter experts as part of the team 1
factors with the Teams focus on specific features 1
number of Coach teams as they learn by doing 1
observations 14

A change of tasks on the fly 1

Adjustment of the processes 3
Build a common backlog 1
Customer involvement 1
Table 9. Distinguish critical tasks 1
Implement project management and control 1
Operational
Invest in learning to refine the requirements 1
processes success Prioritization of the tasks 1
factors with the Prioritize technical excellence 1
number of Synchronization between agile and waterfall processes 2
observations 13
organization, thus providing guidance as to how the transforming company should adapt its Latest
performance metrics. For example, the need to align measures with the evolving agile management
practices means that the measures which were applied early in the transformation will likely
be replaced with new metrics as the transformation progresses (Snyder and Bill, 2018).
fad
Other success factors within this group address the individual level, for example, by
suggesting performance measurements which help implement the above-mentioned agile
mindset by tying performance evaluations to the entire team (Kim et al., 2016) and by
integrating innovation and knowledge sharing as important appraisal criteria (Paterek,
2018). Besides the implementation of adapted performance measures, providing
development and growth opportunities are another method to evoke the desired behavior
(Birkinshaw, 2018). Table 11 displays all success factors which were identified in the
“incentives and measures” category.

3.11 Organizational structure

Success factors in the “organizational structure” group have been mentioned a total of eight
times. The category consists of seven success factors which all were mentioned one single
time, with the exception of the need to “achieve a symbiosis between formal and informal
organizational structures” (Ali, 2016; Paasivaara et al., 2018), which was started in two
studies. This factor is closely related to the need to synchronize agile processes with old
waterfall processes but extends the process view to entire organizational entities (Ali, 2016).
The success factors identified in this group are summarized in Table 12.

3.12 Transformation planning

The second to last group of success factors addresses the first stage of the agile
transformation: the planning processes which precede the actual changes. Here, the need to
create a concrete vision and strategy for the organization emerged as the most-mentioned
success factor, mentioned by three articles (Mancin, 2016; Paterek, 2018; Denning, 2018a).
After the general direction for the transformation is set, the company should set out to
assess the expected costs, benefits and risks of the transformation (Moravcova and Legény,

Table 10.
Role definition and
Define, align and communicate new roles for employees 6 deployment success
Recognize the importance of and changes within the product owner role 3 factors with the
Rotate the role of scrum master between employees 1 number of
10 observations

Align measures with evolving practices throughout the transformation 1

Develop consistent measures throughout the organization 1
Establish personal performance evaluation by the scrum team 1 Table 11.
Establishing incentives to adopt agile methods 1
Incentives and
Innovation and commitment to knowledge sharing are part of performance appraisal criteria 1
Measure the transformation according to the desired outcomes 1 measures success
Provide development and growth opportunities for employees 1 factors with the
Set ambitious “stretch” goals 1 number of
8 observations
IJQSS 2016). The results from the cost-benefit analysis can, in turn, provide valuable guidance for
the setting of concrete business goals (Campanelli et al., 2017). All four success factors
within the transformation planning category are presented in Table 13.

3.13 Tools
Finally, five success factors with single mentions make up the category of “tools.” Other
than employees, tools represent the range of non-human resources, which must be aligned
for a successful transformation to agile. Mostly, the identified factors refer to IT systems,
such as the management of interdependencies between “old,” non-agile systems and new
software systems (Nuottila et al., 2016). This factor is closely linked to the need to align the
new, agile organization and its processes to the remaining waterfall-oriented organization
until the transformation is complete. The tool-related success factors which were mentioned
in the reviewed studies are presented in Table 14.

4. Discussion
4.1 Important success factors
Though we view all the CSFs in our article as significant, top management support may be the
most important one. This is hardly unique for agile. Top management commitment and support
are often cited as one of the most important critical success factors, if not the most critical, for any
change effort (Kotter, 1995; Näslund, 2013; Netland, 2016). Kotter means that unless 75% of the

Achieving symbiosis between formal and informal organizational structures 2

Table 12. Align the organization to the needs of “agile” 1
Map the organizational structure to the real needs of customers 1
Organizational
Preserving existing software product lines 1
structure success Restructure long-established teams to create an “awakening” effect 1
factors with the Set up a product owner team 1
number of Use a common agile framework for the whole organization 1
observations 8

Table 13.
Transformation
planning success Assess costs, benefits and risks of the agile transformation before the start 2
Create a vision and strategy for the transformation 3
factors with the
Preparing well for the first program increment planning event 1
number of Set business goals 1
observations 7

Anticipate and manage interdependencies between affected software systems (as existing systems are
often complex, which agile is not designed for) 1
Table 14. Invest in system improvements 1
Make tools available which allow teams to transition their work procedures 1
Tools success factors
Technical solution 1
with the number of Use existing platforms if they can be adapted to future evolving needs 1
observations 5
organization’s managers buy into the change effort, it will fail (Kotter, 1995). On the other hand, Latest
clarity is lacking when it comes to the actual meaning of top management support and how management
organizations should initiate, structure and drive change projects. Furthermore, significant
research exists regarding the reason a change method is started and if the change method is
fad
aligned with the organizational strategy. Unfortunately, the reasons are often not substantial but
rather political and, consequently, the chosen method is often not aligned with strategy.
Thus, one must question if all the organizations who now embark on the agile
transformation journey are doing it for the right reasons and if agile is a good fit for the
organization. To ensure skills and competence, as well as motivation and commitment to
agile and the ability to work in a new way, training employees emerged as the single most
important success factor for the organizational transformation. This is accentuated by the
identified importance of providing internal and external coaches. Together these success
factors make a strong statement for the crucial role of the education of the workforce within
the agile transformation. However, to determine what kind of training, who will be trained,
what should be taught, how it should be taught, when it should be taught and the amount of
training can be a difficult task. Training can furthermore have many components, from an
understanding of the change effort in general, the impact of the change, the roles of various
employees to specific approaches and tools (Näslund, 2013).
Another challenge on the way toward a successful agile transformation is the need to
implement a new organizational culture by integrating an agile mindset. Changing organizational
culture is a long process, which requires transparency and persistence on multiple levels of the
organization, and thus this important success factor might not be fully implemented for years or
ever, as a true transformation takes time, is hard to sustain and often fails. Yet, again, the cultural
aspect of organizational change is a very commonly mentioned critical factor for any change
method. In his review of CSF for change efforts, Näslund (2013) concluded that the CSF is more or
less the same for all change efforts, they do not differ much over time, they tend to be more about
how organizations approach the transformation versus the actual method and, finally, that top
management support and organizational culture was typically the most critical of all success
factors. In other words, the same aspects that always have determined the outcome will be the
key ones for agile as well.

4.2 Clusters of critical success factors

Based on our discussion above, we feel that it may be useful to structure the categories into
clusters. Based on the work by Näslund (2013), we could place the categories into three
clusters, namely, purpose, process and people; a 3P framework (purpose, process and
people). The first cluster, purpose, refers to aspects such as the logic behind the change that
must be clear and it should be based on substantial reasons. Ideally, there should be a
burning platform and top management has to fully be behind and support the initiative to
give it a high probability of success. The organization has to be ready for change and the
organization has to buy the reason for the change. In short, purpose aspects primarily focus
on change readiness and on activities, often conducted in advance, to reduce future change
management problems. Thus, category 1 – management, 4 – choosing and customizing the
agile approach and 12 – transformation planning, belong in the purpose cluster.
The second cluster, process, refers to more “hard” aspects of the change such as
structure, maps, tools, resources, etc. These aspects deal with the actual implementation of
the change initiative and even though people’s aspects always will be important, the process
aspects focus on people more implicitly and on the structural aspects more explicitly. Thus,
Categories 8, 10, 11 and 13 (operational processes, incentives and measures, organizational
structure and tools) belong in this cluster.
IJQSS Finally, the last cluster, people, refers to the “softer” aspects of change. These are aspects
related to employees and culture, how to motivate employees, train them and reduce the
resistance to change and to change the culture. Thus, Categories 2, 3, 5, 6, 7 and 9
(employees, change leaders, communication and collaboration, culture, teams and role
definition and deployment) belong in this cluster.
While all the aspects are important, properly working with purpose aspects is most
probably required before organizations can deal with the process aspects. Similarly, while
nobody would question the importance of people in change management, one could also
argue that it is easier to get employees to buy into a change project if they fully understand
the nature of the change. A clear purpose, and a solid approach to the process aspects, could
facilitate buy-in from employees. Thus, the 3P, to some extent, work as predecessors with a
strong recommendation to focus on the purpose and process aspects to get the people aspect
to work. Thus, if the Purpose cluster is as important as we believe, then management makes
sense as a top-ranked category. However, one could also argue that transformation planning
should be equally highly ranked and not second from the bottom, as the category most
probably will have a significant impact on potential success. Similarly, one can understand
why the people aspects are ranked so high as a common saying is that change management
is 80% about people. However, our 3P framework suggests that the process categories are
very important to fully succeed with the people categories. Thus, in our humble opinion, the
process categories should be more prioritized.

5. Conclusion
This literature review provides a comprehensive overview of the success factors of agile
organizational transformation. We structured these CSF into 13 categories and then into a
3P framework based on three broad clusters. Based on history and a comparison of the agile
CSF with other change methods, one can predict two things. First, the success of agile is
going to be dependent less on agile specific aspects and more on general aspects related to
how organizations approach change efforts. Second, based on history, most organizations
will have abandoned their agile effort 10 years from now.

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Corresponding author
Dag Naslund can be contacted at: dnaslund@unf.edu

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