Agility Transformation Excellence : Guiding Organizations Towards Corporate Agility

As organizations are challenged with volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA), developing agile capabilities becomes the first priority for most organizations to innovate and respond rapidly to external changes (Klimenko, Winter, & Rohner, 2019). However, a shift in management toward greater agility at the enterprise level poses major challenges for organizations trying to transform their slow-moving, top-down bureaucratic practices (Leybourn, 2019). In this dissertation project the author designed a Corporate Agility Maturity Model to support organizations in their transformational programs by providing guidance on systematically developing Corporate Agility capabilities in a certain sequence that follows the organizational learning journey. The author captured the Corporate Agility as an organizational phenomenon and, therefore, focused on Agility not on the team level or individual level, but at the highest organizational level, where enterprise-wide decisions are made for the entirety of the organization. Although maturity models are an established instrument to devise development paths, currently available maturity models often focus on the control of certain capabilities (doing things right) (Winter & Aier, 2020). The proposed Corporate Agility Maturity Model identifies the organizational Corporate Agility maturity level and derives a roadmap for developing the Corporate Agility capabilities in a sequence appropriate for a given type of organization (doing the right things).

As organizations are challenged with volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA), developing agile capabilities becomes the first priority for most organizations to innovate and respond rapidly to external changes (Klimenko, Winter, & Rohner, 2019). However, a shift in management toward greater agility at the enterprise level poses major challenges for organizations trying to transform their slow-moving, top-down bureaucratic practices (Leybourn, 2019). In this dissertation project the author designed a Corporate Agility Maturity Model to support organizations in their transformational programs by providing guidance on systematically developing Corporate Agility capabilities in a certain sequence that follows the organizational learning journey. The author captured the Corporate Agility as an organizational phenomenon and, therefore, focused on Agility not on the team level or individual level, but at the highest organizational level, where enterprise-wide decisions are made for the entirety of the organization. Although maturity models are an established instrument to devise development paths, currently available maturity models often focus on the control of certain capabilities (doing things right) (Winter & Aier, 2020). The proposed Corporate Agility Maturity Model identifies the organizational Corporate Agility maturity level and derives a roadmap for developing the Corporate Agility capabilities in a sequence appropriate for a given type of organization (doing the right things).