Volvo Cars

Volvo Cars was founded in 1927. It is headquartered in Gothenburg, Sweden. It has around 40,000 employees and produces around 700,000 cars per year. In software development, it employs about 10,000 people with about 150 million lines of code per car. Nowadays cars are steadily becoming “computers on wheels”.

Between 2017 and the end of 2019 Volvo Cars went through a 2 years and a half Agile transformation phase to scale Agile with SAFe.

In a 2020 interview with the Head of Continuous Improvement & Change at Product Creation, there is evidence of a lack of focus on technical excellence as instead suggested by the Agile principles. The interview also reveals a focus on processes and a hierarchical top-down approach, but no focus on the Agile mindset.

Two academic case studies by the Chalmers University Of Technology also confirm the lack of focus on the Agile mindset and the lack of alignment with Lean and Agile principles, a hierarchical approach with an org-chart made deeper by additional levels. One of the papers also notes the inflexibility of SAFe and its disadvantages.

Three years later, Volvo Cars is still using SAFe in several parts of the organisation. In September 2022, an internal source confirmed that a whole department in Volvo dropped SAFe after it became obvious to them it wasn’t adding value. Since then the teams were functioning in a fairly Agile way in spite of the SAFe limitations: the PI planning was becoming mostly for show and the real organisation of the work and the collaboration was happening much more fluidly; the program board was adding very little value in the face of the significant effort spent for it.

This change involved 11 teams and just over 100 people including Product Owners, Software Developers, UX designers, graphic designers, subject matter experts, etc. They wanted to honour how the teams want to continuously plan and not just how they want to work, empowering teams to apply pressure upwards through the organisation in order to continuously improve.

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