Managing The Change

8. Ordeal: Evolve The Change Idea Itself

It’s one thing to create Agile teams. It’s another to make the whole organization Agile. For instance, General Stanley McChrystal in the Iraq Task Force in 2003 had excellent individual teams, but, as he explains in his book, Team of Teams, the teams weren’t collaborating together as one. The problem wasn’t collaboration within the teams themselves, but rather collaboration between the teams:

"The bonds within squads are fundamentally different from those between squads or other units,” says McChrystal. “In the words of one of our SEALs, ‘The squad is the point at which everyone else sucks.” The teams “had very provincial definitions of purpose: completing a mission or finishing intel analysis, rather than defeating [the enemy]. To each unit, the piece of the war that really mattered was the piece inside their box on the org chart; they were fighting their own fights in their own silos. The specialization that allowed for breathtaking efficiency became a liability in the face of the unpredictability of the real world.”

Resolving the problem meant taking steps in several different areas, including bringing all the key actors together in a common physical space to enable horizontal information flows; pushing decision-making down to the lowest levels, exchanging staff between teams, and most importantly, changing his own behavior. McChrystal had to unlearn what it means to be a leader. A great deal of what he thought he knew about how the world worked and his role as a commander had to be discarded. “I began to view effective leadership in the new environment,” says McChrystal, “ as more akin to gardening than chess.”

Thus, the idea of Agile itself will continue to evolve in the course of the journey. This is not a matter of crafting a vision and then rolling it out across the organization. It's not a mechanical eight-step program. It's about continuously adapting the idea to the evolving circumstances of the organization. As the organization and everyone in it adapts the story of change to their own context, each individual comes to own it.

Clipped from: https://www.agilealliance.org/resources/experience-reports/large-scale-agile-transformations-an-insiders-guide-and-toolkit/

Change Management Plan so the burden of being and doing things differently is eased. The change management model used and a useful stakeholder-change matrix tool are covered.

Clipped from: https://www.leadingagile.com/2016/07/executives-guide-leading-agile-transformation-intro-overview-agile2016/

This stuff is difficult and tough to do right, but is every bit as important as the technical aspects of the transformation.

Creating safety

Being influential

Dealing with resistance

Holding space

Maintaining permission

Managing change

7.0 CHANGE MANAGEMENT

This area is addressed by the “People” Agile Transformation team (previous section) that was formed after the roadmap session (section 5.) The purpose of change management in large scale agile transformations is to accelerate the cultural shifts from traditional engineering and management mindsets to ones that are more agile.

The change management part of the program generally follows the 8-step John Kotter model as first described in his book Leading Change (Kotter, 1994). Those steps are: establishing a sense of urgency, creating the guiding coalition, developing a vision and strategy, communicating the change vision, empowering employees for broad-based action, generating short term wins, consolidating gains and producing more change, and anchoring new approaches in the culture.

Creating a stakeholder-change matrix with one axis to identify the major sets of people in the transformation and the other axis to map applicable change management issues has been a useful tool in getting my hands around the cultural shift challenge. The stakeholder sets include people such as developers, QA engineers, program managers, front-line managers, et cetera. The kind of change management issues for each stakeholder include: the type of resistance you might expect, a planned response to help manage it, the benefit they will gain in moving to agile, training they might need, additional resources they might need, a rewards and recognition plan, and a communication plan.

The communication plan is particularly important in large scale transformations. When rolling out agile coaching and training across many teams in waves over a two- to three-month period, those teams in the latter waves might think that they have been forgotten or the program has lost steam. By constantly showing the progress and the rollout plan, teams are reassured that the program is going strong, on track, and their turn will soon be up!

Some of the change management tools and techniques in the trenches used were simple but quite effective. For example, creating colorful and interesting advertisement-like posters, hosting pizza learning lunches, conducting “grill-the-agile-expert” forums for people to express their concerns, establishing a small bookshelf with agile materials in the hallway, creating agile quizzes and awarding agile-related prizes, and so on were all used to raise awareness and increase knowledge of agile.

A small number of leaders have told me that change management was not needed for their organization; that they would just tell their people how things were going to change and they would just start doing it. In some pockets of the organization, that was true but generally not for everyone in the organization. This is due to the way large scale agile affects how people work up and down the management chain, cross-functionally, and cross-teams. We are not just talking about a few, disparate teams running Scrum in isolation. Additionally, being agile in the way you think and operate is different from just doing some agile practices. Again, the cultural shift to “being” agile is very difficult.

Most people in engineering organizations have heard of change management but are not aware of what it truly entails and how to make it actionable. Regrettably, a few think of it as “just so much fluff” but by far most managers exhibit a great interest in it. I believe this is due to their desire to learn something new as well as use it for their own current job function apart from the immediate purpose in driving the agile transformation.

Helping to make the organization “ready and willing” is a reasonable sound bite for what we are trying to do with the stakeholder-change matrix; ready in terms of capabilities and skills, willing in terms of motivation. In practice, this matrix is rarely completely filled out; rather high-likelihood and high-impact issues are identified and addressed.

In my experience, the result of most change readiness assessments conducted with different organizations over many years has been that they were not ready for any more change at this time. That in itself is not very useful if the change has already been mandated regardless. However, I believe they are still worth doing if for no other reason than the huge benefit of awareness, education, and enablement of primarily managers to better deal with the transformation change.

People who were very outgoing and had exceptional people skills made the best leaders as change agents in the most successful transformation efforts.

Each of the coaching types use, at times, one or more of "intervention functions".

Intervention Functions

Activities designed to change behaviours from http://www.behaviourchangewheel.com/about-wheel.

Within Coaches Control

Education - Increasing knowledge or understanding.

Persuasion - Using communication to induce positive or negative feelings or stimulate action.

Modelling - Providing an example for people to aspire to or imitate.

Training - Imparting skills.

Within Leaders Control

Enablement - Increasing means/reducing barriers to increase capability (beyond education and training) or opportunity (beyond environmental restructuring).

Restrictions - Using rules to reduce the opportunity to engage in the target behaviour (or to increase the target behaviour by reducing the opportunity to engage in competing behaviours).

Environmental Restructuring - Changing the physical or social context.

Incentivisation - Creating an expectation of reward.

Avoid

Coercion - Creating an expectation of punishment or cost.

ADKAR - Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability and Reinforcement

Adkar model by Prosci - ToolsHero

D Awareness Desire Knowledge Successful Change Ability Reinforcement

These differences create some implications for change management in an Agile world:

Because there is less planning time (you are going directly from milestones to script), change management templates are less useful

There is less opportunity to formalize and standardize

Because Sponsors and Targets can be exposed to the changes earlier than in the traditional Waterfall approach, there is more immediate disruption, and disruption is constant. Since there is a direct correlation between levels of disruption, and resistance, resistance occurs much earlier, and must be planned for and managed earlier

Given all of the above, change practitioners must be more adept and able to make judgment calls rapidly and often, rather than relying on templates and tools

Impacts on Project Managers, IT, and Sponsors must be managed

 

The same change management deliverables are needed, although the timing for developing these may be altered in Agile.  In the Initiation phase, the foundation of these deliverables should be built:  

Business Case for Action to define what the change is

From-To Definition to identify gaps between “is” and “will be”

Key Role Mapping to identify where Sponsors are needed, and who specifically these individuals are by name

Readiness Planning to have strategies and tactics available to manage resistance

Communication Planning by audience, with feedback loops to gather feedback that identifies potential sources of resistance

From https://www.imaworldwide.com/blog/5-implications-for-change-management-in-an-agile-world

https://www.imaworldwide.com/what-is-change-management

Accelerating Implementation Methodology (AIM) Road Map https://www.imaworldwide.com/blog/5-implications-for-change-management-in-an-agile-world