Organization design in motion: Designing an organization for agility

Abstract

Increasingly competitive and multifaceted business landscapes and the accelerating pace of innovation require organizations to build in-house capability to evaluate the effectiveness of their design and redesign their organizational structure to drive agile product development. The purpose of this research is to examine how the ability of an organization to implement agile is affected by the organization design. A case study based on 35 semi-structured interviews and field observations at a leading, large-size, Danish software development company was carried out. Adopting the contingency perspective, this paper presents the relevant organizational elements that can increase organizational agility and how the companies can leverage the advantages of the design. Accordingly, it provides a framework that compromises eighteen core organizational practices grouped into four categories (organizational structure and governance, culture and people, IT tools and data infrastructure, and processes) to understand the effect of organization design on agile product development.