The New Role of a Change Manager

Agile has revolutionized the way we deliver value to our customers. Due to its iterative nature, traditional change management approaches, which involve training and managing change towards the end of the project, can be challenging to implement. The fast-paced nature of value delivery in agile projects makes it difficult for change managers to keep up. Although some organisations still rely on traditional change management methods, I will present an alternative approach that has been successfully implemented in many organisations that deliver value incrementally. This approach has yielded significant benefits and can be a valuable tool for those looking to adopt agile methodologies.

How can we define traditional Change Management Practices?

Traditional change management practices can be defined as a top-down, hierarchical approach in which most decisions are made by the leadership project group and then communicated and implemented. These practices follow a structured, linear approach to change, with a clear path and timeline. Change managers emphasize planning, implementation, and evaluation of change, and are responsible for driving change, managing resistance to change, and minimizing disruption in business and end customer experiences to ensure smooth implementation of the changes.

Agile Ways of Working

Adopting agile ways of working presents unique challenges for traditional change management approaches due to its collaborative, self-organizing, and iterative nature. However, in my experience, the best way to manage change in agile environments is incrementally, with the agile teams themselves playing a vital role. This includes the product owner, agile coaches, and scrum masters, and the development team all of whom can enable the best approach to change management. To ensure success, it is essential for the team to stay focused on the product vision, goals, and customer alignment, finding ways to manage any potential impacts on these elements due to the speed or type of change. The agile approach naturally facilitates many of the outcomes achieved through traditional change management practices, such as providing knowledge for change, communicating changes, providing transparency to end customers, and collaborating with them. The agile cadence, with various sessions like reviews and demos, supports this approach, allowing the team to inform and showcase the changes made. In this discussion, I aim to explore this approach and identify those who can effectively enable change in an agile environment.

Product Owners

In my experience, product owners can play a significant role in managing or enabling change in agile environments. While they may not always be the ones directly managing the change, they can still contribute to the change management process by working closely with customers or stakeholders to prioritize the backlog and ensuring that backlog items are aligned with the product vision, strategy, and goals. Additionally, product owners often present changes to customers or stakeholders via demo sessions, which are a regular part of the agile cadence. This is what product owners do to facilitate communication and create transparency, ensuring that everyone is aware of what changes are being made and what impact the change will have on the overall product vision. Overall, product owners are crucial in ensuring that changes are aligned with the needs and priorities of the business and its customers.

Development Team

In an agile environment, changes to the product are developed by the development team, which has the best understanding of the process or product. Working closely with the product owner and other stakeholders, the team delivers value incrementally, making it challenging to manage change. However, I have observed that many teams successfully manage change by directly interacting with customers. This approach not only provides an opportunity for the team to seek instant feedback and generate ideas, but also allows them to tweak the process rather than just adding features. While the iterative nature of value delivery can make change management difficult, direct customer interaction enables the team to ensure that changes align with customer needs and expectations. Overall, the development team plays a critical role in delivering value incrementally and managing change effectively in agile environments.

Conclusion

In an agile environment, the role of change manager can be fulfilled by various actors due to the incremental nature of value delivery. In a traditional setting, change managers typically employ a top-down approach. This is because the value delivery occurs towards the end of the project, and the change size is often substantial, making implementation challenging. Therefore, engaging a change manager is crucial to help the company overcome resistance to change and to overcome resistance to change, it is important to engage a change manager. In contrast, in an agile environment, teams deliver changes incrementally using agile principles, collaborating more often, self-organizing, and continuously improving their process and product based on customer feedback. This customer-centric approach reduces resistance to change as the team listens to feedback before building the next feature and tries to align with the customer. This customer-centricity makes the change look like a solution to an existing problem the customer is facing, making it more attractive. Agile coaches, product owners, and the development team all play an important role in implementing change, leveraging their strengths to manage the change incrementally. The incremental nature of value delivery makes it less complex for everyone to digest.