Investigating the Establishment of Goals in Large-Scale Agile Development

Maintaining competitiveness in future business environments requires agile organizations to implement systematic changes such as adapting existing goal-setting practices. Such changes can only be accomplished by taking a holistic view of the development organization. In large-scale agile development, the whole development organization is considered, and some scaling agile frameworks support practitioners to establish goals by providing recommendations for goal-setting practices. However, so far, only a limited amount of research investigating the establishment of goals in scaling agile environments exists. Against this backdrop, we present a case study to explore how goals are set and documented within eight programs at a large German automobile manufacturer. Moreover, we identify and categorize goals, present goal-setting challenges encountered by the case organization, and formulate seven mitigation propositions to address these challenges. Finally, we evaluate these mitigation propositions and discuss the evaluation results by incorporating the qualitative feedback provided by the interviewees.