Interpreting and operationalizing enterprise agility in construction: a safe-based case study

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.