Den organisatoriska strukturens påverkan på Agile i praktiken

Abstract

Agile as an idea was created in 2001 through the Agile Manifesto with focus on social relationships, communication and flexibility. This was a reaction to the traditional, hierarchical organization with the goal of restoring balance within organizations in the IT business. Today we can see a transit of Agile from the IT-industry to other industries and areas, such as HRM. There is a challenge in attempting to traditionally control a social idea such as Agile, and there is a lack of empirical studies of the organizational context and its effect on the interpretation of Agile in practice. This study is an attempt to connect Agile to the science of business administration. The purpose with this study is therefore to research the organizational contexts effects on the interpretation of Agile in practice, within IT and HRM. Where Agile is established or well known. To fulfill our purpose we chose social constructivism as our scientifically approach, and conducted 12 in-depth interviews. Our research method, due to our scientifically approach, is qualitative with an inductive method. Our findings and results are that Agile itself is creates opportunities to rapidly adjust and respond to a constantly changing environment. This is possible in a constellation of self-organized teams and it requires an agile thinking through the organization as a whole. The organizational context therefore effects the interpretation of Agile in practice, through social relationships within the team but also through organizational structure in forms of existing hierarchical leadership or decentralized co-leadership. Agile and agile teams require a decentralized organizational structure. The recommendations for further studies is to include different organizational levels, to interpret how they translate Agile into practice, in a way that optimizes value within the organization.