• Agile Coach

Agile team change agents beware! 5 tips for (even) more impact

Discover the 5 tips (+ bonus tip!) to increase impact as an agile team change agent:

1. Change? Create a clear vision
Too often I have stepped into an Agile initiative without a clear vision. Then Agile working becomes an end in itself. And doing Agile without serving a higher purpose produces resistance and frustration. Establish a vision that makes clear what Agile working delivers. In addition, make the importance clear. Why is it important to make this change now ?

Vision Example: Together with our customers, we create smart solutions in no time.
Importance: We are losing market share because our competitors are faster and more responsive to customer needs.

2. Define your starting point and force field
Blind get going? Can. But without knowing what kind of environment you’re getting into, you’ll quickly become ineffective. Analyze! Measure the organization’s culture, system dynamics, do an integrated organizational analysis and/or stakeholder analysis. You now know better where to put your focus. Be aware of which forces will help you in the transformation and which forces within the assignment may work against you.

3. Team up
Especially as an external change agent, you can’t bring about the change on your own, let alone ensure assurance. Involve leaders from the organization and create a transformation team. This is an Agile team that ensures the change stays up to speed, with feelers in the organization. Appoint a Product Owner for the transformation from within the organization, who has mandate to make changes. And make sure you have broad representation on your change team #support. The organization must own the change.

4. Hypotheses and experiments
Agile transformation is a complex change. Often you don’t know exactly which initiatives will work. Change ideas are often hypotheses based on assumptions. Formulate each change as a hypothesis and set up an experiment for it.

For example: We think dedicated Scrum teams ensure that less time is lost in team composition and switching between projects. The benefit is that Agile teams become attuned to each other, become more productive and complete projects sooner. We see this in the happiness measurements, velocity in the teams and the shortened time to complete projects.

5. Measure progress and success
It has been said that an Agile transformation is a journey. To a destination that is not yet entirely clear. The right route? Tip: look not only at the result you want to achieve, but also at metrics you can already retrieve in the interim. Focus not only on e.g. faster time to market with your product, but also on how many Scrum training teams you already have, the size of your features or how many learnings those teams have done. The latter metrics allow you to steer faster.

Bonus: Who are you as a change agent?
If I’ve learned anything, it’s that not every context suits me. I am most effective in a learning organization: creativity, experimentation and knowledge sharing. Not in an organization where gaining consensus or playing politics is the dominant culture. Know what energizes you and don’t be afraid to conclude that the context doesn’t suit you.

Wondering how to put these tips and more into practice?

Want to go in depth with these topics?

We have a brand new training course: Agile Change Management.

It was created by asking participants in our Agile Coach Training in which areas they would like to improve.

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