Agile is here to stay, delivering change at an ever-increasing pace. So where does change management fit in the Agile world?
Change management remains a critical enabler to good project delivery. Without it, technical excellence can be undermined, yet it remains one of the most challenging to get right. This is because at its heart, change management is forever dealing with people and the impact that changes to technology and process have on them.
Agile has staked its place in the project management discipline and as project delivery accelerates off the back of this, how can change management retain its rightful place without being left behind?
Change Management: A Dark Art or a Way Through the Wilderness?
In a waterfall or iterative project environment, the delivery of change often has a time advantage. If the project is being delivered at the end of the cycle, the change team know their timelines very early in the piece. The change effort will typically be heavy upfront during project initiation to enable it to define the change strategy.
There will often be a hiatus during design, build, and test, when the change team is not necessarily needed full time. It is during these breaks that change management can be well planned prior to the one-off go-live when the change effort ramps up prior to implementation, which enables it to execute against the change strategy.
In an Agile implementation, the time advantage evaporates. A true Agile project will be delivering constant change (and thus, impacts on users) on a regular basis. The nature of Agile sprints can be swift (2-3 weeks apart) and often the impacts on users cannot be truly known until the sprint commences and the requirements are locked down.
Given that managing change is often a dark art, even in a traditional Waterfall environment – when the team have time on their side – how does change get managed in an Agile environment with rapid, on-going deployments?
Change Needs a Place at the Planning Table
It’s critical that Change Managers are engaged during the planning phases for all Agile projects and their voices are heard and respected. The size and timing of each Agile release needs to consider not just apropos the technical development complexity and lead times, but also the magnitude of impact on staff and customers and thus the change management challenge.
The size of the technical change is not always linear in terms of user impact. The change team need to have a seat at the table during the planning of an Agile project to ensure the change impact is planned for and sufficient time and resource set aside during the Agile sprint.
Communication Becomes Even More Important
Agile projects work on reduced timelines and take on a different project cadence whereby most everything is on the critical path with little allowance for contingency. Effective, timely, and flexible communication therefore becomes critical, as there is literally no time to be communicating the wrong message or too little of the right message.
The change team need to be very clear and focused on those communication activities most critical to success of the project and maintain the discipline through all the sprints.
You Need the A-Team
Anything that has to be performed under pressure will benefit from experienced campaigners at the helm. This is no different when delivering change management in Agile projects.
Engaging an experienced change team is critical. Due to the speed at which things move, there is less room for error, and there is less time to develop workable solutions if you’ve taken a wrong turn. Furthermore, the user groups can begin to suffer change fatigue as each successive wave of Agile sprints changes their work environment.
Given that Agile is just another methodology to deliver change, the importance of change managers with experience in Agile is less important than their deep experience in managing change. It is this experience that will help them to get to grips with the volume and pace of change coming down the Agile pipeline and to better engage and support the user base.
The fact that change could well be coming thick and fast indicates less need for a pure Agile experience and more of a requirement for a Change Manager who really gets change, first and foremost. They can quickly understand the issues likely to face the user groups and help them to navigate a successful change pathway.
Agile and Change are Here to Stay
This is not an exhaustive review of the critical considerations in ensuring that Agile projects are set up for success, however, given that Agile is here to stay and so is change, the change approach needs to be modified in the absence of longer lead-times enjoyed during a waterfall or iterative delivery
Both Agile and Change are being delivered at a more rapid pace than project professionals or the businesses have ever known in the past. However, it is not just about compressing a Waterfall timeline into a series of Agile releases and expecting a positive outcome. Ongoing engagement of the change team during all planning cycles, crisp communication, and getting the right team in place will enhance the opportunity for project success.
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