Breaking Through with Agile Change Management

Editor's Notes

• #4: Limited collaboration – classic problem of PO not being available to the team. Out of sync with product cycles – if marketing and sales don’t take a more iterative approach, customers will likely be confused Expectation setting is all about communicating upward to executives. Treating change as a problem is common if leadership hasn’t adopted the Agile mindset.
• #5: Change is hard for everyone, but in our experience, different group experience it in different ways. Managers often feel like their team is going to lose all accountability if it becomes self-organizing. This is a fine distinction between self-organizing and self-managing. This is really a question of ownership. A technology manager told me once, well if the team asks for this one process change, what’s to stop them from doing whatever they want? In addition, product managers and creatives in particular can feel very pressured to make decisions. The pace of Agile is different to what they’re used to, and they have to battle perfectionism and put out “good enough” concepts. On the team side, for those who are less engaged, taking ownership because they are afraid of what will happen if it doesn’t work out. I In addition, high performers may feel like they are not going to get the same recognition as before. But typically having more freedom and ownership over process is the best motivator for this group, in addition to not burning out.
• #9: Many people outside of the profession think about KM as a discipline in charge of implementing intranets and document management systems. But we have all seen the danger of throwing technology at a KM problem, or taking a one-size fits all approach. The goal of KM is not to accumulate as much documentation as possible – KM is only a worthy enterprise if people are actually using the knowledge that has been assembled. Because collaboration is so essential to the success of KM, it’s not something that can be imposed by managers on employees or completely outsourced. Without collaboration there can be no ownership, and without it, the KM project will quickly lose steam as soon as executives turn to another problem, or consultants leave. The taxonomy by org chart example I mentioned earlier? We came in and engaged users to design a new taxonomy, and use of the system skyrocketed almost overnight. Generally, the change we’re talking about in an Agile project is in scope – typically budget and timeline are fixed. With complex projects, change in scope should not be feared but welcomed. In fact, if you are collaborating with people, you will often find many innovative ideas on how to work together better that may take precedence over others.
• #10: How many of you have seen this chart before? This is the part where I usually see business stakeholders’ eyes glaze over. This chart was never meant for them, it was meant for Scrum practitioners, people who might be developing the product or filling the ScrumMaster role. Where is business value on this diagram? It’s somewhere in the box, probably, but this isn’t going to be enough to sell Agile to your typical CFO, or head of sales.
• #11: Here’s how an iterative, incremental approach might look. You start with a prioritized backlog of work, take the highest priority items into a short iteration of a few weeks, review progress daily within the team, and come out at the end of a cycle with a demo of a small piece of a working product. This allows a team to get feedback from customers or stakeholders that allows them to course correct earlier. Agile promotes the idea of releasing a minimum viable product: releasing a product before it’s fully built out to get customer feedback on it. So yes, ideally, there really is a release every few weeks – some are even less – Spotify releases upgrades a few times a week and Facebook does daily. It’s important to note the different between project (build to spec, then it’s done), vs product (something that evolves continuously as long as it’s being used). If you think in these terms, the Agile cycle can be applied to many types of products – marketing, financial, etc.
• #13: While these are all interesting and valid conclusions, I think we’re looking in the wrong place. Maybe the problem is actually in the way projects are run and the expectations around them. Many projects are going to be longer, more complex projects – which means the risk is even higher for a change in requirements. Many times, the scope of a problem is much larger than originally anticipated, or the root cause of a problem is different than initially thought.
• #14: - Agile was inspired by lean manufacturing, which was created by Toyota The Lonely Planet legal team adopted Agile practices after seeing it work with their IT team, including retrospectives, a backlog, daily standup, etc. Oreo’s a great example of agile marketing – they responded to the Superbowl power outage in 2013 by tweeting “you can still dunk in the dark” KLM is an example of a highly Agile social media brand from a customer service perspective. The #happytohelp campaign last year (show video)? Was about creating delight by reacting to what people were tweeting
• #17: Some of these cultural factors come from Carte and Fox – but they can be adapted to fit any organization
• #18: Some of these cultural factors come from Carte and Fox – but they can be adapted to fit any organization
• #19: Change management techniques can be applied to any type of change – for Agile we typically see multiple types: people, for organization changes, roles and team formation; process, for the way they are managed, and technology/tools as well. Agile is going to be a foreign concept to many people outside of IT, who are key to its success, so it’s important they understand why the change is taking place and how it affects them. In terms of taking ownership, working collaboratively also helps people be engaged with the changes taking place.
• #21: One of the key principles at EK is knowledge sharing – please reach out, even if you don’t need help. I would love to talk to you!