Investigating Safe Implementation In Railway Industry : A case study at Alstom DC Sweden

Abstract: Organizations have always tried and pushed themselves to bring changes in how they conduct business. They do this to reach the market quickly and achieve customer satisfaction. This master thesis was conducted at a global leader transportation company, Alstom, to investigate Scaled Agile Frameworks (SAFe) adoption in their Sweden Development Centre, identifying SAFe implementation challenges in a safety-related development as a single-case study. For the thesis, two research questions were formulated to identify the implementation challenges and find their reasons. For the data collection of the thesis, semi-structured interviews, self-completion surveys, and relevant research papers were used to serve the purpose of both primary data and secondary data sources. The researchers acted as ethnographers by participating in the company’s daily events and taking notes. The analysis of the collected data was done using the triangulation approach to get reliable results. In addition, researchers also used SAFe core competency assessment to evaluate the business agility of the case organization.The analysis from the collected data resulted in five implementation challenges. The data suggested that the major challenge was insufficient training and lack of agile mindset among the team members. The case organization had invested in training and support for going through the transformation, but the agile training was interrupted in 2019. Since then, the knowledge about SAFe and the agile way of working was acquired based on learning by doing. Based on the data, the researchers concluded that lack of continuous training has resulted in the development over time of other implementation challenges like insufficient self-organization, nonoptimal team size, and lack of clarity when defining role responsibilities. The data also suggested that transparent communication between different levels may still be a challenge. The SAFe assessment that has been conducted resulted in confirm previous result that in some places complemented the identified implementation challenges.  Key Words: Scaling Agile Framework, Implementation challenges, Lean, Waterfall, Self-organization, Continuous learning culture, Safety related development, Business agility, Ethnography.