How Software Engineering Transforms Organizations: An Open and Qualitative Study on the Organizational Objectives and Motivations in Agile Transformations

Agile Transformations are challenging processes for organizations that look to extend the benefits of Agile philosophy and methods beyond software engineering. Despite the impact of these transformations on organizations, they have not been extensively studied in academia. We conducted a study grounded in workshops and interviews with 99 participants from 30 organizations, including organizations undergoing transformations ("final organizations") and companies supporting these processes ("consultants"). The study aims to understand the motivations, objectives, and factors driving and challenging these transformations. Over 700 responses were collected to the question and categorized into 32 objectives. The findings show that organizations primarily aim to achieve customer centricity and adaptability, both with 8% of the mentions. Other primary important objectives, with above 4% of mentions, include alignment of goals, lean delivery, sustainable processes, and a flatter, more team-based organizational structure. We also detect discrepancies in perspectives between the objectives identified by the two kinds of organizations and the existing agile literature and models. This misalignment highlights the need for practitioners to understand with the practical realities the organizations face.