An information systems department undergoing an ‘agile transformation’

Agile principles and methods have been so successful that, from the 2010s onwards, company managements have wanted to integrate them into programmes to transform internal operating methods. This is sometimes referred to as agile transformation. The particularity of this new managerial trend is that it attempts to integrate into a control system what is primarily a professional regulation system deeply rooted in developers’ profession. Project management frameworks in software development are at the heart of the debate initiated by the agile manifesto, but they are frameworks shared with other players in these projects, such as finance departments. This article examines the case of an information systems department that has been particularly successful in adopting agile methods insofar as it has committed itself to them completely autonomously. Moreover, the activity itself leads the individuals involved to constantly monitor, explore and create their own doctrine, methods and legitimate project management tools. The limits are not so much the maintenance of hierarchical logics as the contradiction with project governance in terms of management control, which remains profoundly traditional and attests to the enduring difficulty computer scientists have in changing the organizational norms of project management.