Agile initiation in a multinationalorganisation : A Case study at Volvo Cars, Department of Manufacturing Engineering

Background: Today, multinational enterprises (MNEs) within the manufacturing context are eager to adopt agile methods to seek business agility that copes with uncertainty and rapid flexibility in the organisation. However, agile methods and the values were purely at the beginning designed to suit small software development teams (Dikert et al., 2016; Hobs & Petit, 2017; Kalenda et al., 2018). Existing literature has extensively explored the agile transformation process within the software industry and identified success factors and challenges in the transformation phase (Hobs & Petit, 2017; Conboy & Carroll, 2019; Kalenda et al., 2018). However, there is an absence of research on agile methodologies outside the software development industry (Brand et al., 2021). Therefore, understanding what distinguishes and what challenges in the initiation phase of an agile organisational transformation within a manufacturing context was explored. Research Question: What distinguishes an initiation phase of an agile transformation, and what challenges emerge from this in a manufacturing development department? Theoretical Framework: The theory of dynamic capabilities will serve as a foundation for describing and understanding the linkage between an organisation’s agile implementation and strive for agility. The theory of organisational transformation will be presented to explain further the research phenomena that distinguish an initiation phase. Methodology and data collection: This study follows an abductive research approach. A single case study has been conducted at a Swedish automotive manufacturer that has initiated an agile transformation. Conclusion: Dynamic capabilities are closely related to the arguably unexplored field of agile and the implementation of agile methods and values. The findings indicate that if a foundation of dynamic capabilities exists, it may be easier for an organisation to implement agile. Still, the dynamic capability framework may lack the knowledge for an organisation to conduct a transformation. Therefore, a suggestion is made that the dynamic capability framework should be complemented with the theory of organisational change, mainly to understand how to reconfigure ordinary capabilities towards dynamic capabilities