Agile Change

In an environment of technology disruption, organisations are increasingly challenged to make change happen at scale and at speed. Their ability to be responsive to customer and stakeholder needs and adaptive to changing priorities will drive competitive advantage. Agile has a key role to play in enabling these outcomes. 

To play their part, change managers need to adapt their approach, mindset and toolkit. There is no silver bullet, but the lessons learnt and principles shared in this point of view will help avoid common mistakes when managing change in Agile environments.

• Focus on the ‘moments that matter’ – Spend less time and energy on creating slides and spreadsheets and more on meaningful engagement with stakeholders, co-designing the change experience around them
• ‘Be transparent to build trust’ – Open the doors to your stakeholders, shifting focus from a ‘comms and stakeholder engagement plan’ to engaging stakeholders early with regular feedback and allow them to see more of the process
• Integrate Change with Agile – Embed change managers into the scrum team, align ways of working and delivery cadence and share responsibility for driving change and adoption
• Understand the Minimum Viable Change – Evaluate the Minimum Viable Change required to effectively deliver the desired outcome and embrace ‘done is better than perfect’ mindset to free up time for meaningful stakeholder interactions
• Embrace the Agile way of working – Set expectations, highlight differences to other delivery approaches and invest time in helping the business get it.

Whether you are supporting change on an Agile project, or a more conventional Waterfall delivery, embracing Agile change principles can make you a more effective, customer-focused and integrated change manager and bring faster, better outcomes.