Agile Practices in Production Development : Investigation of how agile practices may be applied in a production development context and what the expected effects are.

Globalization has continuously brought an increased competition among companies, which entails a need for faster and more frequent deliveries of new products. Traditional project management methods, such as stage-gate and waterfall, are commonly used in production development projects and builds on a sequential approach. These methods have proven to have some disadvantages in flexibility, long lead times and it often creates communication barriers between the actors at each stage. The software industry has already encountered these obstacles and responded by introducing agile project management. Which improves the adaptability and allow changes to be made, due to new requirements from stakeholders or customers, throughout the entire development process. However, it remains unknown how agile models can improve production development. The purpose of this study was therefore to investigate how agile models can be applied to production development and what the effects are. The authors have performed a case study at eight different companies within the automotive industry. The purpose of it has been to gain a deeper understanding about the case companies current production development processes and review how familiar the organizations are with the concept of agile project management. The extraction of the empirical data was conducted by questionnaires, interviews, and document reviews. An analyzation was done by comparing the empirical findings with the theoretical background out of eleven different categories that relates to project management (e.g., project goals, process, customer integration etc.). The analyzation concluded that the case company exclusively conducts their production development project by using a sequential approach. The analyzation and the eleven categories where, together with the theoretical background about agile project management, later used to create the result by brainstorming different practices to become more agile. The results are prese