Agile Contracts: Learnings from an Autonomous driving Sourcing Project

New digital services and products rely heavily on digital technologies and need to be deployed in an ever-shorter timeframe in response to rapidly changing market demands. To address this challenge, more and more companies are applying agile practices to increase speed and flexibility. In consequence, companies review their sourcing strategies to shorten the duration of tenders for large-scale IT projects and to increase flexibility in contracting of IT services to cope with the anticipated consequences of digital transformation. This study aims at revealing how agile practices could help to reduce time-tomarket and to increase contract flexibility. As the automotive industry is especially affected by the adoption of new digital technologies, this revelatory case study shows how a German car manufacturer increased agility in sourcing and contracting of an autonomous driving development platform. Agile practices turned out to be essential in dealing with technological novelty and hurdles, regulatory uncertainty, and frequently changing requirements. We contribute to the extant knowledge by providing practical recommendations on how to increase agility in sourcing and contracting of large-scale IT projects.

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