So, what is Agile Change Management - and how do we go about creating a useful definition for us?
In other posts in our Agile Change Management series, we explored some of the background to Agile as an approach including:
In this post, we get a little more prescriptive and practical with a working definition of Agile Change Management itself. We also take a look at a few Agile myths we come across on an almost daily basis and their impact on people’s view of the role of Change Management in an Agile environment.
A good starting point is to consider the two levels of Agile that organisations are working on right now, namely:
Agile at an organisational level is strategic and concerned with the direction and velocity of the organisation as a whole. It is about making the entire entity more Agile in the way it responds to the market, and for us, this means that Agile is about everyone being ready and able to; evolve their role and practices quickly, and to make (what are often) cultural adjustment to support new business models.
Being able to deliver Agile at an organisational level demands a model of Enterprise Change Management support that is responsive and relevant to the needs of organisations having to transform themselves in a way that is all-encompassing. It demands a change capability that can quickly scale to support and prepare people up, down, and across the organisation to deliver Agile at this level.
In our high-velocity world of change, change management has to be everyone’s business –and not just the special sauce of a small number of experts. Wherever people are around the world – remote or distributed – individuals, leaders, and teams need to be able to gear up quickly and manage the risk of perpetual loading; release sufficient capacity for business-critical changes; plan and execute individual initiatives right the first time and with the right resources.
Agile at the development-processes level is concerned with evolving solutions through the collaborative efforts of different teams. It is about breaking projects into smaller iterative pieces – based on the assumption that circumstances change as a project develops, and planning, design, and development must be prepared to evolve as it makes contact with people.
Agile project managers are not too different from other project managers, in terms of their focus on delivering successes to time, cost and scope, and for real results to be achieved, we still need change management to support adoption and usage. It is just the pace and nature of an iterative development process that requires change management to adjust to being most effective.
Agile at the development-processes level still requires strong sponsorship, local manager engagement, effective communication, learning, and reinforcement. It still requires an understanding of change impacts capturing and reporting on change data and key potential risks around commitment levels etc via a Change Management toolkit. It’s just the way that you work on these activities and integrate them with the Agile team processes that will dictate change managers’ relevance and success.
The diagram below shows an example of how we see this working in client environments, with change management able to operate at pace and ready to pivot as sprint reviews and retrospectives drive adjustments in project direction.
Challenges for bringing Change Management into an Agile environment, whether at an organisational level or business-processes level, play into the hands of some Agile myths which we feel are worth debunking.
Perhaps the greatest challenge is the tendency to be less strategic and planful about the necessary process of getting people to adopt new solutions. From our discussion with clients, this is driven by 2 common Agile myths
At an organisational level, Agile Change Management is institutional.
At a development process level, Agile Change Management is adaptive and flexible.
It starts with the basics; after all, change management is still about standing in the shoes of people who need to adopt new solutions and putting a plan together to get them there. Thereafter, it is about:
What is clear is that the requirements and demand of Agile development processes mean that organisations need more Change Management not less, but change management must become Agile too. Project delivery and people adoption must have a harmonious rhythm and pace if the benefits of Agile are to be realised.
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Read our Comprehensive Guide to Agile Change Management To help you navigate the topic of agile successfully, we have created a single, comprehensive guide that considers:
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