In today’s rapidly changing and competitive environment it has become necessary for companies to become more agile and respond to demands efficiently and effectively. By being agile or-ganizations would be able to adapt to changes quickly, transform easily and lead into the competitive market. Hence more and more companies nowadays are trying to move from traditional software development methods to more innovative and agile software development methods. This thesis focuses on one of the multinational telecom company X and the unit Y within it, which is also willing to adapt to changing environments and innovative ways of working.

Unit Y is considering improving its current traditional software development method for change release process. Currently the ITIL process along with the waterfall model is followed for delivering changes, which is quite lengthy and time consuming and also presents additional challenges. After analyzing these challenges and drawbacks unit Y is willing to improve its service delivery to its internal customers. This thesis, therefore, focusses upon analyzing the differences between the waterfall model and the agile model, determining the better of the two, recommending a suitable agile method for unit Y and creating a plan of action required for the adoption of agile practices.

The theoretical framework of service dominant logic and value co-creation along with the service innovation approach is used to gain customer insights and conduct a detailed analysis. The iterative process of service design along with a number of tools and methods is used in the empirical part of the thesis. It is used to conduct the research activity in a systematic way and to visualize the end results with the help of a variety of tools.

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze how the adoption of new innovative software development methods can improve the existing change release service. The research started with a desktop research activity and based on the results of this activity, subject matter expert interviews were arranged along with an ethnographic interview with the internal customer. Popular media search was conducted in order to build a detailed understanding of the waterfall and agile software development methodologies. Based on this information, a stakeholder map was created to identify key participants of a co-creation workshop. A day long co-creation workshop was conducted with all the identified stakeholders and internal customers. Tools such as customer journey map, mind map and SWOT analysis were used in the workshop to identify challenges in the existing process, requirements and expectations from the service and to analyze customer mindset towards change. Based on the results of the exploration and creation stage of the service design process, a solution is prototyped using service blueprint. An implementation framework model is also provided for the transition. This thesis attempts to seek definitive answers that are set in the beginning of this thesis.