Bernard Augey’s thesis defence

Introduction

LATTS is pleased to announce that Bernard Augey’s thesis defence will take place on Wednesday 1 July 2026 at 2.00 pm at the Paris School of Urban Planning, on the Cité Descartes campus. His thesis is entitled:

“The agile transformation of an IT department: changes to the organisation, management and business functions within Pôle Emploi’s Information Systems Department”

This doctoral thesis was carried out at the LATTS, under the supervision of Pascal Ughetto, Professor at Gustave Eiffel University.

Composition of the jury

• Bénédicte Geffroy, Professor of Business and Management Sciences, IMT Atlantique, Examiner
• Cécile Guillaume, Associate Professor of Employment Relations at the University of Surrey, Rapporteur
• Gilles Jeannot, Professor, École nationale des ponts et chaussées, Examiner
• Pascal Ughetto, Professor of Sociology, Gustave Eiffel University, PhD supervisor
• Philippe Paumard, Head of the Skills, Training & IT Educational Engineering Department, France Travail, Deputy Director-General for Technology

Abstract of the thesis

Since the 2010s, the IT departments of large organizations—much like many large corporate groups as a whole—have increasingly sought to adopt so-called agile methods for their project management principles and practices. Many refer to this as an “agile transformation” that needs to be implemented. This thesis examines the case of the IT department at Pôle Emploi, focusing on the change trajectory intended to steer the organization toward this agility. This research provides an opportunity to document the conditions and modalities of this change. It also offers the possibility of contributing to a better understanding of the work of IT professionals and their professional identities within the context of working in the IT department of a large company. The thesis is based on interviews with stakeholders at all levels of this IT department and on observations of projects conducted according to the relevant methodologies. Based on observations of IT work in progress and interviews with its actors, the study examines the information systems department at Pôle Emploi, an organization facing the destabilization of its former monopoly on the job market and calling for a digital transformation of its services. Its IT department has seized on an agile mode that was already latent within it to align itself with the institution’s strategy by carrying out an agile transformation at the departmental level. The examination of the trajectory of change highlights the importance of returning to the conceptual models of agile development. The trajectory is, indeed, made up of two paths, one relating to a scope limited to a single team, simple agility, and the other aiming at the coordination of several agile teams, agility at scale. The thesis reports on these two paths, which intersect in a dynamic of agile transformation of IT management. A diversity of deployment emerges, both in the hybridization and concerted use of several simple agility methods and in the articulation of these hybridizations with agility at scale, which is deployed uniformly and remains close to the initial model. With the agile mode, the IT profession, and more particularly the activity of developers, is certainly changing, but it also retains areas of stability that persist and constitute new links between old and new professional benchmarks. If there is a transformation, it is taking place through new spaces for socialization brought about as much by the implementation of agile methods and the new work situations they generate as by the company’s own systems. This transformation of practices and identities is reinforced by the integration of the elements that drive it into the strategic line of management. Agile transformation is not just a matter for developers and IT specialists who make up their professional group. The management line, even if it can be considered part of this group in terms of its front-line managers, is subject to a two-stage change brought about by agility. First confronted with simple agility, then embracing agility at scale, it has been part of the various stages of the transformation movement, adapting and rebuilding the meaning of its function. At the same time, the human resources function is faced with the dual necessity of supporting internal change and ensuring compliance with the framework set by the company.