From Deadlines to Drumbeats: What Agile Really Does to Organisations

Joana Geraldi, Associate Professor, Project Studies, CBS og Iben Stjerne, Associate Professor, Leadership and Organizational Psychology, DTU

Agile has changed more than the way projects are managed. It has changed the organization’s operating rhythm: how teams plan, pause, deliver, learn, and decide what comes next. Based on an ethnographic study of the scaling of agile through SaFE, Scaled Agile Framework in a large financial firm, this presentation explores how agile changes not only how fast work moves, but also how work itself is structured in time. It shows how project work may shift from temporary efforts with clear endings toward “continuous temporariness”: a flow of short cycles, structured pauses, enduring teams, and iterative decisions.

For project practitioners, this opens a practical conversation about what is gained, what is lost, and what must be actively managed when agile comes to dominate project-work and create a new organizational pulse.