The Role of Consultants in Translating Agility-An Actor Network Approach to Consultancy in a Management Trend

Abstract

With the speed of the business environment increasing more and more organizations are turning towards agility and agile ways of working. Agility is often expected to make organizations more flexible, allowing them to increase their operational performance in a fast-moving and complex environment. The popularity of agility is partly driven by a need for organizations to act faster and be more flexible but also because it is fashionable. Becoming an agile organization often means implementing agile frameworks and methods of working. To facilitate the implementation of these methods and frameworks, organizations often hire consultants that already have experience with agility. The empirical foundation for this paper are semi-structured interviews with 25 people from 12 different organizations who have experience from working in implementations of agility. In order to analyze the implementation process the translation model from Actor Network Theory was used. Through using the translation model this paper discusses the role of consultants during the implementation of agility, studying how consultants make clients and agility interact. In line with previous research on consultancy the findings suggest that consultants are often expected to drive change. However, this paper complements previous research on consultancy through using the concept of spokesmen from Actor Network Theory to discuss what happens once consultants leave the client. The main findings of this paper are: 1) As one size does not fit all, the interviewees argue that consultants need to tweak the concepts based on the individual needs of the clients. 2) It is more difficult for consultants to help with the implementation of agility in organizations who seek to copy the success of other agile organizations without understanding the extent of the change. 3) Consultants act as spokesmen for agility but the temporary nature of consultancy causes difficulties for anchoring agility long term.