The 3 Levels of Change Implementation for an Agile Coach

The Three Level Process of Change-Implementation

1. Planning of Change – what we want to change and why (remember metrics, as well as the reasons why we’re doing Agile). The desire of the leadership is to bring about change as effectively as possible. A measure of effective change is that things remain stable. While there is some value in ‘breaking things up’ and creating some dissonance for positive change to take affect, we need to be careful, as coaches, to balance the approach.

• The leader or change agent must have comparative ways to think about change (conceptualization, review of models or examples). Story mapping works well here, visualizing the whole (lean concept), and transparency (wallboards/other visual aids).
• The leader must consider the decision-making approaches allowed within the team/organization/company, ie., how are decisions made and approved?
• Determine how much freedom of decision-making capacity you have without the input of others.

2. Developmental Level – plans are solidified and a strategy is put into place as to how we are going to execute the change. Incremental change is good here. Start small, start effective. Prioritizing change is important. There is a lot of work to be done, and we can get to all of it in due time.

• Stakeholders or vested parties in the change must be on board, accountable, and ready to execute the change.
• Internal champions are a big plus here.
• Determine the roll out strategy: Are we starting at the team level? Enterprise level? Architecture first? Technical debt first? Training? Etc.

3. Announcement Level – the revelation of the change to the company and teams. The change has been decided in due process through the planning of the change as well as the development of the change. It’s time to announce it.

• Should this be you? Probably not. Internal stakeholders should really take the reigns of announcing the change.
• Metrics! – Why are we doing this? Tell me why we’re doing this change, tell me how it’ll make things better.
• Make it fun – Hopefully (if you can) there can be some excitement around the change. Hey, we’re making things better!
• Make it visible – Email sucks. Meetings suck… but don’t have to be. Be creative as to how you announce these changes. Informal can work too.