Information Polity

As public organizations increasingly adopt agile practices, understanding their opportunities, challenges, and transformative potentials is important. This article introduces the special issue on ‘The Future of Agile in Public Service Organizations: Macro, Meso and Micro Perspectives’ and explores the evolving landscape of agile in public service, drawing from diverse scholarly perspectives. To that end, we discuss various definitions of agile in the context of government and outline the potential benefits and drawbacks of the concept. We then delve into the macro-level characteristics and impacts of agile on institutions and society, its meso-level implications regarding organizational structures, processes, and outcomes, and micro-level determinants and effects on managers, employees, and teams. Referring to theoretical streams building the basis for agile on these different analytical levels, we build a conceptual framework of multi-level agile government. We introduce the six research studies and a book review included in this special issue and position them within this framework to highlight their contributions to understanding agile at each of the three levels.

Agile approaches are increasingly being used in the public sector. What is driving the adoption of agile ways of working, however, remains unclear. In this paper we ask the following two questions: Which agile approaches are being used in public sector organizations? Under which circumstances do public sector organizations use which agile practices? To analyze these questions, we conducted a standardized survey among over 450 civil servants in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. Results from the logistic regression analyses indicate that various forms of agile practices are used in the public sector in all three countries. PSOs operating in constantly changing, uncertain environments are more likely to adopt agile. Political and managerial leadership is vital if the aim is to become more agile as a government. Finally, the results show that tasks that require constant internal and external stakeholder involvement and those that require radically new ideas and ways of working lead PSOs to introduce more comprehensive forms of agile working. This work advances the state of literature by providing the first quantitative analysis of the state of agile in the three countries, developing an analytical framework and measurement of agile government, and analyzing the external circumstances under which agile is being used in the public sector.

In this paper, we call for an integration of project management logics within the now mature field of public strategic management, to analyze the potential contribution of projects in terms of increased strategic agility, in a context where traditional strategic planning and management tools and approaches are increasingly seen at risk of not being responsive enough to rapidly changing external conditions.

To pursue this objective, we carry out a problematizing literature review on the two streams, by incorporating journal and book contributions from the last 30 years on Web of Science Database. 509 contributions have been quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed to answer two interconnected research questions: What is the state of the art in the literature on the interactions between project management and public strategic management? And, how can project management logics be integrated within traditional strategic planning and management processes in the public sector in order to achieve strategic agility?

We find that, until today, public management literature has only sporadically dealt with the potential influence of project management logics on strategic management and, more in detail, strategy implementation. Furthermore, the review enables a discussion of five organizational drivers fostering an agile approach in public strategy implementation. Using a narrative approach, they then lead to the formulation of five researchable propositions.

We conclude by proposing an updated model of the strategic planning and management cycle in the public sector, factoring in potential agile practices and feedback mechanisms induced by incorporating project logics in the implementation of strategy.

Despite citizen calls for agile government, public service organizations often default to hierarchy and adopt dual structure organization designs combining agile and non-agile units. However, ensuring effective collaboration and avoiding accountability challenges at the interface of line and agile units remains a vexing issue. Although accountability is implicitly assumed in agile organizing, it is not readily manifested or experienced. Through this interpretive case study of a public service organization in the Nordics, we examine through the lens of felt accountability, the reaction and roles of line managers to emergent accountability challenges precipitated by parallel maintenance of agile and non-agile unit combinations.

Despite growing interest, we lack a clear understanding of how the arguably ambiguous phenomenon of agile is perceived in government practice. This study aims to alleviate this puzzle by investigating how managers and employees in German public sector organisations make sense of agile as a spreading management fashion in the form of narratives. This is important because narratives function as innovation carriers that ultimately influence the manifestations of the concept in organisations. Based on a multi-case study of 31 interviews and 24 responses to a qualitative online survey conducted in 2021 and 2022, we provide insights into what public sector managers, employees and consultants understand (and, more importantly, do not understand) as agile and how they weave it into their existing reality of bureaucratic organisations. We uncover three meta-narratives of agile government, which we label ‘renew’, ‘complement’ and ‘integrate’. In particular, the meta-narratives differ in their positioning of how agile interacts with the characteristics of bureaucratic organisations. Importantly, we also show that agile as a management fad serves as a projection surface for what actors want from a modern and digital organisation. Thus, the vocabulary of agile government within the narratives is inherently linked to other diffusing phenomena such as new work or digitalisation.

In times of crisis and with the increase of new ways of working, public sector organisations increasingly include agile practices in their working practices. To successfully transform public sector organisations into agile organisations, public servants require a new set of competences. Informal learning is a key element that helps public servants to build and apply these competences, e.g., through the collaboration with external experts in public sector innovation fellowships. To observe how collaborative competences for agile public organisations can be developed successfully by involving external experts, I conducted a case study on two iterations of a public sector innovation fellowship. My findings show that throughout the fellowships, competences are being developed in a collaborative process on a personal and organisational level. The practical application of the learned methods, personal reflection, and the development of organisational networks transform the collaborative into a learning process, allowing public servants to develop new competences and bring them into their organisation.

While extensive literature exists on agile practices in private sectors, its application and outcomes in the public sector remain relatively unexplored. In light of recent theoretical debates on how using agile may improve the functioning and results of government organizations, we empirically investigate the outcomes of agile adoption on value creation in public administrations. Drawing on a theoretical framework on value creation in public service delivery, we conduct a comparative qualitative case study involving 19 agile initiatives across the three German government levels. Our findings reveal that agile leads to numerous positive outcomes at both individual (e.g., employee well-being, human-centric leadership, skill development) and organizational levels (e.g., cross-functional collaboration, increased efficiency and transparency). This study contributes to substantiating theoretical claims about agile benefits in government, offering in-depth qualitative insights and theory development.