Abstract
Agile is one of the most popular contemporary management concepts and buzzwords. This paper provides an in-depth examination of the influence of the Agile concept on the discourse, thinking and practices of organizations worldwide. The paper traces the emergence and evolution of the Agile concept from inception to the present by synthesizing findings from a wide range of academic and practitioner-oriented sources. Overall, the picture that emerges from the analysis is that the Agile concept has grown considerably in popularity and has become one of the most dominant concepts in public management discourse. The popularization of Agile has, to a large extent, been driven by an active supply-side made up of actors such as consultants, coaches, and trainers. Another finding is that the Agile concept has evolved considerably over time, from its initial presentation as a narrow and specialized concept rooted in the software development community to a much broader and general approach applicable across nearly all types of organizations and industries. The broadening of the concept has led to neologisms such as Agile Marketing, Agile Government, and Agile Management. The paper ends with reflections on the current status of Agile and some speculation about the concept’s likely future trajectory.
Highlights
A standard definition of Agile is that it is “ . . . the ability to create and respond to change
Several reports published in recent years support this view. These reports show that Agile has grown considerably in popularity in recent years and become highly fashionable (Denning 2017a; Rigby and Bilodeau 2018; The Economist 2018). In light of these conflicting views of the current status and the future trajectory of the concept, it is becoming important to take a historical view of the emergence and evolution of the concept in order to obtain a better understanding of how the Agile concept has impacted the discourse, thinking and practice in the organizational community
There appears to be some consensus that the concept is rooted in the software development community (Meyer 2014; Prange and Heracleous 2018b) and that the concept was popularized in the aftermath of the release of the Agile Manifesto (Beck et al 2001)
Summary
A standard definition of Agile is that it is “ . . . the ability to create and respond to change. Gren and Lenberg (2019) have proposed a shorter and more straightforward definition of Agile as “responsiveness to change”. From these definitions, it becomes clear that the concept of Agile is mostly concerned with organizational responsiveness and adaptability in what many commentators describe as increasingly turbulent and dynamic competitive environments (Bennett and Lemoine 2014a; Kaarbøe et al 2013; Millar et al 2018). Agile is currently one of the most popular catchwords in the management community (Nyce 2017; The Economist 2018). Agile Management is one of the newest and fastest-climbing concepts in the top 25 list, matched only by Big Data Analytics
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