Psychological safety in large-scale agile projects

^Highlights

• Our ACS Professional Partners at UQ Business School
• are investigating the factors that contribute to psychological safety in large-scale agile projects and how these factors influence performance at the individual, team, and project levels.

Background

Agile Software Development (ASD) methods like Scrum have become dominant in software development. It is estimated today that over 95% of developers worldwide adopt ASD methods. As organisations scale these methods to large projects involving hundreds of developers, with frameworks such as SAFe and LeSS, successful implementation at scale remains challenging.

Psychological safety--where team members feel safe to take risks, communicate openly, and learn from mistakes is widely regarded as a critical factor in a team environment. While psychological safety is well-studied in small teams, its dynamics in  large-scale agile environments are less understood and merit further investigation.

The Need

Large-scale agile projects often lose key elements that foster psychological safety due to complexity and increased coordination and communication. Understanding what contributes to psychological safety—and how it impacts performance at individual, team, and project levels—can help these projects succeed. 

Our objective is to study the dynamics of the relationship and the evolution throughout the project lifecycle. We aim to identify actionable insights for improving team dynamics and outcomes.

Next Steps

To advance to the next phase, we are inviting companies with software development projects (involving 50 or more professionals) to participate in this performance study. All responses will be handled confidentially, ensuring anonymity of the responses, with only aggregated results used for analysis and reporting.

Participating companies will gain:

• Insights into developer well-being and performance across project stages.

• Analysis of agile practices (e.g., Scrum of Scrums, retrospectives) to guide  adaptation.

• Benchmarking against global teams to highlight strengths and areas for improvement.

• A set of anonymised best practices derived from large-scale data.  

• Early access to findings and tailored recommendations to enhance project performance.

The findings will be shared with participating organisations and validated through peer-reviewed publications.

For more information contact:

Dr Bikesh Raj Upreti
Business School
The University of Queensland
E: b.upreti@business.uq.edu.au
P: 0450 415 290

Suzanne Brangwin
Business Development Manager (Research), BEL Faculty
The University of Queensland
E: s.brangwin@uq.edu.au
P: 07 3365 6662