Agile transformation success factors: A practitioner’s survey

Abstract

An agile transformation process presents challenges to organizations around the world. Research on agile success factors is not conclusive and there is still need for guidelines to help in the transformation process considering the organizational context. This research proposes a survey among practitioners to identify the difficulty to implement success factors in organizations to create a fertile environment for agile transformation. We conducted a survey with 457 practitioners resulting in 328 valid responses. The findings show that the success factors implementation difficulty rankings generated for all practitioners and for expert practitioners have a high correlation. According to expert practitioners, measurement model and changes in mindset of project managers are the hardest success factors to implement while incentives and motivation to adopt agile methods and management buy-in are the easiest to implement. The contribution of this research is a ranking organizations can use as a reference for their agile transformation processes.