INTERPRETING AND OPERATIONALIZING ENTERPRISE AGILITY IN CONSTRUCTION: A SAFE-BASED CASE STUDY
Part Of
Annual Conference of the International Group for Lean Construction, IGLC
Journal Volume
34
Start Page
1252
End Page
1264
ISSN
23090979
Date Issued
2026
Author(s)
Abstract
Despite its large economic scale, global construction productivity has stagnated over the past two decades, with fewer than 1% of mega-projects meeting cost, schedule, and benefit targets. These persistent performance challenges are a result of the high complexity, non-standard nature, and high multi-stakeholder coordination demand of construction projects, which strain rigid conventional management models. Enterprise agility has been widely adopted in other industries to address similar limitations in flexibility and coordination; however, there is a lack of empirically grounded interpretations of how agility transformation frameworks can be meaningfully adapted to the construction industry. This study examines how enterprise agility can be interpreted and operationalized within a construction organization. Using the Scaled Agile Framework for Enterprise (SAFe) as an analytical reference architecture, a qualitative case study is conducted of a large-scale general contractor in Taiwan, with analyses interpreted within the context of Lean Construction principles. An explicit competency mapping procedure is used to analyze observed lean-agile organizational practices against SAFe’s five core competencies. The results show that enterprise agility in construction emerges selectively across SAFe competencies, manifesting most strongly in leadership enablement, cross-functional coordination, and pre-construction value planning, while portfolio-level agility remains fundamentally constrained by contractual and financial commitments.
Event(s)
34th Annual Conference of the International Group for Lean Construction, IGLC 2026, 22 June 2026 - 26 June 2026, Singapore
Subjects
agile transformation
collaboration
lean construction
Transformation-Flow-Value
Value stream
Publisher
International Group for Lean Construction
Type
conference paper