Agile Adoption in Public Agencies : A case study of the Swedish Tax agency

Abstract: Citizens’ expectations of products and services produced by the public agencies are rising incredibly due to the fact that savvy startups and other global technology businesses have been succeeded in providing a high standard of digital services in the past decades. This, in turn, puts pressure on the public agencies in how they need to work in order to meet the citizens’ expectations and needs. Besides, during the years, there are a number of projects done by some of the agencies that has been identified as not having succeeded in delivering the desired value, staying in budget and delivering the project’s result in time. Therefore, there is a need for actions in order to counteract this. It is believed that applying Agile into the agency’s project management will help them to not only meet the citizens’ expectations, but also improve the project’s outcome. Many agencies have been hierarchical for a long time involving complex and rigid structure, and the fact that they have been working with a Waterfall-based methodology for a long time. Therefore, adopting this Agile approach implies a number of challenges for the agency. Thus, this thesis aims to investigate to what extent the Agile approach can be implemented into the agency by identifying the challenges that the adoption of Agile entails. A number of different previous research and literature about the Waterfall, even called traditional in this thesis, and Agile project management methods have been reviewed in order to provide theoretical frameworks that are of relevance for this study. As the research subject is quite complex and broad, a qualitative approach has been utilized to obtain in-depth knowledge. Interviews have been conducted with employees from the investigated agency, and in order to pursue a comparison with how other public agencies have worked with a potential Agile adoption, interviews have also been conducted with a second agency. The thesis finds that applying the Agile project management method into the investigated agency will imply some challenges. A total of seven different challenges were identified which can be briefly summed up as following; Employees being too comfortable with old methods; Staff has difficulty committing to the new working culture; Agile is not a “one-size-fits-all” method; Large size projects; Heavy documentation; Financial reporting practices affecting the efficiency of Agile planning; Lack of competencies or some competencies being considered rare, hence there is no guarantee for each team to have all competencies that are needed. This study’s result shows that the studied public agency can work with Agile project management methods to a wider extent than what is done today. However, there are a couple of challenges, and solely working with the Agile method was showed to not be recommended. In order to find out if the Agile approach can be used in other works that are not covered in this study, or if the result can be applied to other sectors as well, further research is required.