Agility as a Driver of Digital Transformation - a Literature Review

Agility has become increasingly relevant in research and practice in recent years. Originating from software development, it is now progressively applied beyond this field. This agile scaling enables companies to harness the benefits of a flexible and rapid response to change. Widespread digitalisation, increasing complexity and dynamic competitive conditions require companies to demonstrate flexibility and speed of response to drive a digital transformation (DT) towards a digital business. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies have been confronted with DT. Against this background, this paper aims to derive from previous research how companies can benefit from agile project management and agile scaling in DT. For this purpose, a structured literature review was conducted on four scholarly databases, 225 articles were found and reduced to 28 relevant articles through a methodical approach. The review revealed that agility is defined as a driver of DT. Starting from agile digitalisation projects, agility can be carried into the organization and thus support DT. Nevertheless, while the connections between pandemic and DT and between agility and DT are already the subject of research, the two fields have not been linked in the analysed articles. The findings synthesize the current state of knowledge and suggest first agile approaches to framing DT in the context of the pandemic. Future research efforts are needed to provide companies with measures for dealing with the “new normal”.