Agile software development methods have now become a mainstream in managing projects and teams with a development-production cycle. This is because agile methods have proven successful. Agile has been praised for:
creating high performing teams
aggressively cutting back development timelines
improving management support for projects
unlocking the secrets to a genuine continuous improvement practice
correcting IT cultures
even landing man on the moon! (https://sommersol.com/artikler/2023/how-nasa-used-scrum-and-agile)
More than a trend or a catchword, agile is here to stay. Agile principles include satisfying the customer, welcoming changing requirements, delivering frequently and at shorter intervals, working as a team with all the right people, motivating people through environment and trust and a strong reliance on face-to-face communication.
In order to flex into an agile environment, change managers can provide support in four main ways.
Examine Organisational Culture
Examine the extent to which the organisational culture is supporting agile. Diagnosing this might include listening to the language that is being used around agile and teamwork, and making observations about the maturity of the broader agile implementation.
Greater maturity in agile culture shows up as moving through an environment from isolated pockets of practice, creating excellence in those areas and then connecting up the well-performing pockets.
Eventually responsible leaders become accustomed to agile practices, and this extends to more senior management.
At the pinnacle of agile practice customers - both internal and external - will be integrated into the development cycle early on and will be happy with both their level of contribution and with the results they're achieving.
While aspects of broader organisational maturity are unlikely to be a priority for the manager who hired you, it will be fundamental to how well agile ways of working are adopted by your project stakeholders. This will add value to your own stakeholder management, as well as to the broader team. Should difficulties with the agile process arise, you'll be able to share your diagnosis and contribute to finding a solution.
Adapt to an Agile Change Management Cadence
While its still necessary to undertake a sound process, change managers can adjust their execution cadence to follow that of the development team. Focus on the matters arising in the regular communication meetings, also known as Stand-Ups.
For many projects, these meetings are daily and the key is to focus on just enough information sharing, training or engagement with just those stakeholders who need it right now. These meetings are for prioritisation and alignment. By keeping your activities relevant to the topics covered at the meetings, you'll be sure to be prioritising well, and aligned with the team.
Focus Stakeholder Management on Impacted Audience
One of the benefits of agile is the involvement of the customer during the development process - which is very closely aligned to change management principles. Quite often customer representatives are embedded in the team, present at brainstorming and development sessions, available for consultations, reviews and sign offs. However, this customer involvement activity may not be lead by the change manager.
In Agile teams, there is much greater interaction between project team and customer representatives and it happens more frequently. Stakeholders are constantly involved.
If the change manager attempts to also map out and manage duplicated stakeholder relationships, wires get crossed, confusion ensues, and team members who really need to liaise with stakeholders regularly can get annoyed at the disruption.
Change Managers are well advised to take a step back during stakeholder planning, allow the embedded relationships to be managed by others in the team, and focus on working with the impacted audience.
This will be the second tier of people who aren't involved in developing the solution, but will be impacted by it, or required to use it.
It may feel a bit rushed and counter intuitive but these tips might help.
Establish a channel into teams impacted by the current sprint
Populate the channel with 'heads-up' messaging.
Start with easy-to-implement awareness comms
Continue with more detail about what will be coming, who's working on it, when it will be implemented, what it will mean for them
Conduct an engagement session (or training if you have the time) to launch the changes into the team at the end of the current development cycle.
Remember Change Management is about Individual Readiness
Remind the team that the process individuals go through when accepting change is not the same as the software development lifecycle. For changes to be accepted beyond the representatives embedded in the project team, change management work will still need to be done.
Seek clarity on roles and responsibilities early so you know where to focus your support and can create a plan accordingly.
For more support on this, have a look at: https://www.agenciachange.com/post/content-process-change-management
Agencia Change has many agile support tools, including a bespoke agile change management process. We coach Change Managers and Business Leaders and we also implement change projects. To find out more:
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