A Quick Guide to Agile Change Management

hi there welcome everyone and thank you for joining us for today's jpmg webinar a quick guide to agile change management it's mark constable here i'm with the apng team in the uk and i'm delighted to be joined by a regular apng webinar presenter melinda franklin a number of you may well indeed be may well have attended previous webinars with melanie but for the benefit of those that haven't and maybe aren't familiar men and he's an experienced project programmer and change management practitioner author trainer and consultant who's recently launched the continuous change community on linkedin which

i would thoroughly recommend joining if you're involved in change management so a bit about today's session with the pace of change ever increasing and indeed accelerated by challenges brought on by the pandemic it's it's more important than ever for practitioners to equip themselves with the latest thinking methods and tools to thrive and that's why melanie will be taking us through the key aspects background and benefits of an agile approach to change before melanie gets into the detail bear with me a few more moments while i cover a few logistics for the session uh so the

first point is the session is being recorded and everyone that's registered will receive a follow-up email from us tomorrow as soon as the recording and slides are online secondly you should see an option on your go to webinar control panel to submit questions uh feel free to do that at any point and we will try to address as many as we can towards the end and and we it's quite an interactive session so many will be one in your input in a couple of areas so so do use the the question function for that when

we get to that as well um something that isn't on the screen but do look out for actually come straight after this intro actually is a poll just to find out a bit more about our audience and and last but not least we welcome any feedback as that's really helpful when it comes to planning and delivering webinars in the future and and just one more point as well just with the current situation it's probably no surprise to learn that where uh both myself and melania are working from home so we hope there are no connection

issues but we'll we'll attempt to get back up online as soon as possible if there are but uh yeah just bear with us please just in case there are any issues okay interruption issues great stuff i think that's the scene set so so welcome melanie thank you for being with us again and over to you right mark's going to put a pole up in front of you just because i want to get to know a little bit about you and it's not an intrusive question it's just where you're spending your time in terms of what

you do for an organization so um just click on one of the options um i can't see the poll mark can and then he'll tell me what the results are so yeah yeah thanks about us on screen now for everyone uh see the votes coming in so yeah just uh what best describes your current role is it change manager or similar project manager or similar or neither of the above and we've got over eighty percent already so so now we've got 46 percent change manager or similar 32 project manager or similar and it's when where

it's kind of flicking 22 23 over there above okay so you're probably somewhere in in some kind of business as usual line management uh role there so that's what i'm going to interpret from those 22 as mark said i'm going to get you to do some work today um because i'm going to post some questions for you um but let's get started so what on earth is agile change management that's the first thing i think we'll go for um so really what agile change is doing is bringing together the project activities that create the tangible

change so anything where we're creating something new so we might create um we might be procuring and wanting to implement a new system uh we might be doing an organizational redesign or we might have a new product or service that we want to launch for our customers we're going to go through a simple process of you know researching and designing developing it testing it and getting it ready whether we do that in an agile form or whether we do that in a more traditional project management approach doesn't matter whether it's in other words whether we

deliver it incrementally or whether we deliver it um as a as one thing we know always that in order to realize benefits we're going to have to go through the change activities so it is essential that the world's of project and change are combined because the value for the business only occurs when there's a shift in how things are done project outputs don't realize benefits on their own they have to be used and old ways of working have to be stopped for us to realize the benefits so it is not good enough just to put

something in front of somebody we've got to help them through in terms of change management and so it's that combination of both the project activities whether it's a new app or whether it's a new production line combined with getting people to think through well how am i going to use this how is this going to change how i work how does this change how success is measured for my role are there new policies and standards that we have to apply and of course are there new attitudes are there new values and behaviors that i actually

have to go through so the first thing is and the reason that this is so important is that for agile change if we're being agile what we want to do is we want to get things into operational use we want to make a difference so what we're going to be doing incrementally but we're going to be doing it is making sure that we don't just create things but that it we actually shift the way that people work so that's the key thing bringing these two together for a purpose the purpose is that we are making

a difference we are creating new capability for our organization we are shifting how things are done to be more efficient perhaps more streamlined more relevant because they're innovative whatever it is we bringing together both the project and the change activities because we're making a difference the next thing to say is that agile change refers to the incremental nature the agile in agile change really does mean incremental um and it's the thing is the traditional approach where we've got our current ways of working and we want to move to some new vision some new end goal

well that traditional approach comes with a lot of risks and i think organizations have had a sharp learning curve on some of those risks in the last year or so the first is that there's a risk that the end goal is no longer relevant because it's been overtaken by changes in circumstances both outside the organization we've all been there with the push to knowledge workers becoming remote workers in organizations across the globe we understand what covid has done to our working practices we know that we've had massive redundancy programmes as a result of covid organizations

don't have businesses anymore to run so they are stopping certain services we understand that there's a risk that you know this ideal end goal that we thought of a year ago is now something completely different there's also though in the traditional approach i think the risk that by spending time perfecting the solution and getting every every single thing that you could possibly want developed and included in the solution and therefore the time frame is much longer the danger is you go quiet you go quiet in front of your clients and in a very crowded marketplace

when lots of your competitors are out there all the time innovating and dripping drip feeding things into the customers drip feeding things into the market by going quiet and not launching something because you don't want to launch something only partially finished is that the argument i hear a lot that it's not quite good enough i mean i had this conversation earlier this week and it just felt like i was it was ten years ago but these people had very strongly held beliefs that they had to perfect everything before they could go live and the risk

that really resonated with them once i brought it to their attention was this risk of going silent though you don't do anything for your customers for 15 months because you're perfecting the right answer whereas competitors are out there every few months launching new products and services and that's why you're losing business it finally the penny finally dropped with them and i also think there's the internal risk that over time if i if the end goal is too far into the distance there's the risk that the money or the sponsorship or both will run out before

there is any kind of return on investment we know how quickly executives are replaced if they are not seen to be performing so if we dangle an end goal 18 months two years away there's a good chance the person sponsoring that initiative won't be around to reap the rewards of it and that also creates a funding crisis for us because the funding gets terminated before the job gets done whereas of course what we're doing here with our agile approach is that we're getting in an early return on investment it might not be everything but if

there is a workable solution or part of a solution that we can put into working order straight away and then we can get that return on investment so that's the other concept the agile change is to address those risks of the traditional approach by getting straight in there with something that will make a difference and the other thing i think the core to agile change is that agile in agile change refers to the flexibility the agility is the flexibility in responding to changing circumstances the changing circumstances mean that the the end goal needs to flex

we've just talked about the danger of sort of sticking with an end goal that might become obsolete or irrelevant over time far better that we have a mechanism which accepts that as the norm because that's how it feels in the 21st century and actually instead takes active steps to deal with it so what we're doing is that we're we're making sure that we're considering what might be changing you know we don't just keep going for the original end goal for the sake of it because circumstances have changed now this is a really simple slide but

it belies the challenges underneath the most common one which always surprises me is that organizations don't have any kind of rigor and regularity in their hunt for factors that might be changing so they establish they decide internally what their values are what their goals are what their strategic direction is but they don't have that regular challenge of what else has changed they don't have that regular hunt going on um it might be part of the board agenda but it's actually not sort of happening in lots of different areas of the organization and there's no sort

of funneling up of where people have noticed a a change in perhaps how customers behave and funneling that up to the real decision makers to actually consider do we need to shift our end goals i'll give you an example from my own life which is um that over the last 10 months one of the things i've noticed is that if i'm providing training courses um as opposed to um pre-covered those training courses i used to do on-site i mean you know that i'm often helping organizations lead lots of big change initiatives um and i i

do lots of workshops but formal training courses used to be two days you know in the classroom or there's the big change management practitioner which would be five days in the classroom and that's how my world was now what's happened is that customers have changed what they want from me they still want me to provide those qualifications but um for many corporate bodies they can't do the two full days because it just their remote working really doesn't respond well to that so i'm chunking things up into sort of two or three hour sessions and delivering

them over a number of weeks now that's the kind of change that i've experienced in the front line in response to my customers now if i was part of a big organization it would be making sure that we funneled that up to the the executive leadership to to really get them aware that actually what's wanted by customers is actually starting to shift and change and maybe their end goal as a result of that input needs to amend and change as well so i i find it really interesting that organizations struggle to put some kind of

process some funneling process in place where that kind of information can be easily sort of taken up to the decision makers but equally i find it interesting um that the decision makers are not necessarily open um to what is changing and they they don't actually want to do what's on this diagram they don't want to i mean not massively pivot away from where they were going but just slightly shift the perspective to slightly shift the emphasis and the priorities to maybe include things that they hadn't originally wanted to include or to exclude things that are

no longer appearing as relevant so it's about there's an open-mindedness and one of the things that i find interesting from a leadership perspective is that that open-mindedness requires a level of courage so agility and in this change perspective i think there are three things i've chosen to highlight tonight i can talk for weeks on this subject but i think it's about bringing making sure that we are bringing together the worlds of project and change um that i think it's really important um that we have that incremental nature so that we deliver as early as we

possibly can and i think it's really impos important that we do a lot of flexibility as well now the reason i'm bothering to summarize these points is that i'm hoping that what you are doing right now is i would like you to share your views and there's hundreds of you on this call but what i'd like you to do is to put in the the question function is just i'd like you to identify what you think the benefits of an agile change approach are now the reason i'm inviting you to share your thoughts is not

just because i want this to be interactive um but i genuinely want to hear your views because i think that there's a lot of things that you'll raise that are relevant to your world and i will probably agree with all of them but the other reason that i'm asking you to sort of raise these benefits is because as project and change professionals we are likely to be the ones that are going to have to almost justify him i'm sorry to use that word but certainly explain what an agile change approach is it's obviously the common

sense approach to a world that is so uncertain it's a common sense approach to the fact that the end goals do need to change and flex that we do need to deliver as early as possible because the patience of our customer base has shortened over the years and that there's so much sort of else out in the marketplace that we need to frequently get in front of them with new ideas so that technology keeps changing and we keep needing to respond to it so there's agile change is a very common sense approach to the factors

that really govern the third decade of this 21st century we have never been in a position where there is so much change and again with a client this afternoon i was just saying you know we're using agile change to respond to the fact that there is far more ambition than there is resource to carry it out and that what we're going to look at in in this webinar is the importance of prioritizing and choosing making choices about what comes first so i think it's really important that you guys are able to sort of start to

think for yourselves actually this is quite sensible i like it because i think it has a benefit because so you can replay some of my words back to me if you want or you can put other ideas out there but i'd really like to hear what you have to say is anybody putting anything in the questions or comments uh yep they're all coming through now um okay so what i'm gonna do i'm gonna just move on to this slide here so what i did last time i did this on the last webinar and you guys

told me you loved it so what i'm gonna do is i'm going to uh basically capture your thoughts so i am going to be uh the stenographer and mark is just going to he has the really difficult job of skimming through everything and trying to pull out the comments and i did warn him that he'd have to work really hard um so i've got no real sympathy so off you go mark tell me whatever you want to say all right uh so a bunch of these things cut so can see results and quick wins seeing

change happen quickly yeah yeah i love that idea that can see the results because i think we are in a we are in a results-driven achievement-driven um evidence-driven evidence-based world now and being able to tell somebody that i'm busy is not quite as impactful as saying i've done something there's something ready for use um people have started working in a new way it's a far more impactful conversation isn't it yeah so what else you've got mark uh continuous delivery and doesn't that build up confidence is the fact is that you haven't just had one little

success uh but it is it's not and in fact what i'm going to do is bring that onto the same line as quick wins because i think it's quick wins and continuous delivery continuous quick wins i think um because we can create momentum from that i do think that there's a there's a momentum to success if you like and that that really does build motivation so i get quite excited by that be nice if i could spell the word motivation but there we go um we'll keep going on that what else we got there mark

said there's quite a lot uh you probably won't be surprised with the words adapt and pivot in them so i've heard if they just take two in particular so the ability to pivot if required based on organizational needs yeah so based on organizational needs i think one of the things that that does is it makes us more responsive doesn't it and i think um it is about that having that sort of a process that rigor for asking what is changing uh but based on organizational needs it makes us responsive and if we're responsive i think

what that does it makes us relevant so it makes the changes relevant rather than being seen as a you know just spending money for the sake of spending money we can actually say well no we we pivot and we adapt to changing needs and we're always meeting your needs so i think it makes the world's a project and change um a far more compelling uh offering what else we got yeah uh so it's kind of similar on that but the the adapt the ability to adapt to unforeseen things uh chief and unforeseen yeah because none

of us are um uh crystal we have a crystal ball so unforeseen needs as well yeah okay what else ability to fail quickly you didn't read my linkedin post then the other day did you um i said that i wanted to replace the words fail fast to in in i'm going to put the opposite of this which is succeed quickly um it wasn't my words by the way i think it was in a pmi report but um i absolutely loved it because i know that in the boardroom i do not use the word fail um

it's a career limiting word um so i tend to avoid it um far better to talk about succeed quickly than fail fast yeah brilliant okay what else have we got uh so quicker quicker roi and uh yes in benefits sooner uh builds confidence in the business that you can uh deliver are you seeing is believing builds confidence i love seeing as believing thank you that's a great phrase oh i like that yeah there's a really there's a couple of really good analogies in here as well but um yeah trying to keep on top yeah you

can copy me the um you can copy me the chat function later and what i'll do guys is i'll read through all of it and i'll start to share some of those comments through linkedin i know a lot of you are linked in with me so if you're not please do connect with me and i'll share some of those thoughts so i'll i'll i'll do a little write-up of this webinar because i always find it really interesting um can i just say that on the quicker return on investment um that one of the this is

a i think it's maybe a marketing perspective it's it's certainly a view that we that what happens is we turn from a cost base to a profit center and i think there's always something in there isn't there about um i've worked in this space for three decades and and i'm the one who's spending the money and making you know upsetting business as usual by making change happen um so the earlier we do get that return on investment the more likely i am to be seen in shall we say on the on the good side of

everything by the one who's bringing in the money either by increasing revenue or reducing costs but suddenly i'm on the right side the argument suddenly the finance director doesn't hate me anymore i'm seen as something useful in life so i think there's something very strong in that one and got a couple more mark yeah yeah there's a few around um it encourages innovation oh yes and yeah constantly learning and refining to get the best possible solution which takes us into that space doesn't it around being a learning organization um i can't remember the first textbook

i read on that but i think it was in the early 1980s um so and there is something here about i'm going to go into my my specialty of neuroscience at this moment and and talk about the fact that actually where we feel a sense of achievement is on the journey not on the destination so the fact that we've got this iterative incremental approach which means that we keep learning we keep developing that actually means that we've got almost um a constant stream of motivation because we're constantly developing things and that makes us feel that

oh great that's another achieve i've learned something new i'm better than i was before and actually from the brain's perspective that keeps us very well motivated yeah what's the next one um well i'll share the analogy i've got to show you this one so um the analogy that in an agile change world we are dolphins always coming up for prayer in a non-agile world we're more like whales underwater for longer okay um rather than whales who stay underwater longer i love that um let's get a couple of visibility effective collaboration yeah i think i'm going

to get don't worry and effective collaboration yeah yeah collaboration is the key thing isn't it because if collaboration is the i think it's the opposite of being arrogant um because um collaboration is uh about you know um tapping into others expertise and i think it's the opposite of this of arrogantly assuming i know the answers and i think that can make a very compelling working environment more open that way very difficult to talk and type by the way and get things right there we go opposite we'll go with opposite shall we go visibility and you've

got uh one more so i'm clearly running out of space yep someone says easier to run bau at the same time okay um that's a contentious point that running business as usual at the same time some people would say yes because changes are smaller and therefore and less disruptive and others would say no there is this constant change so we i think we might touch on that in just a moment so uh we'll have a look at that and last one then creates more ownership in the business yeah and and the reason we care about

that is that change only happens if those impacted get involved so if there is no ownership then we've got a real problem because actually we're doing it to them and they're not picking up and running with it so actually yeah where are we going to go with that we're just standing on the sidelines shouting you should work differently rather than people picking up and running with it kind of enjoyed that it was really good fun okay right let's have a look then at if if we're getting to grips with agile change i wanted to draw

to your attention some of the key skills that i see out there that and behaviors that we need to adopt i think the first is that we have to have a sort of courage of living with uncertainty um i think this is um instead of getting gathering all the requirements up front and creating that complete plan um and showing how they're going to be delivered i mean that that looks and feels very comforting actually because it if i can draw the journey from end to end it looks like i'm sort of totally in charge of

what i'm doing and and that sort of gives out a certain confidence um but of course the opposite of what we do in terms of change instead of gathering all the requirements up front um and creating that complete plan what we do is we concentrate on the most valuable changes and once those are up and running we move on to the next most valuable piece of work um and it does take courage because it looks like we don't really know where we're you know we don't know the whole story um but what it means is

of course that we are being um authentic we're not promising certainty when there isn't any because you've probably heard on some of these webinars i've said on the gantt chart if i if i knit together a gantt chart of all the requirements on something we've never done before that's truly experimental then it's actually a bunch of lies the further out i go the bigger the lie i'm telling because i'm guessing how long it's going to take i'm guessing that i've captured every activity that's needed and i'm going to be proven wrong quite a few times

so by drawing this up front i'm actually sort of it's it's a at best it's a fantasy it's a hope that this is how things are going to run but we pretty much know that within a few weeks we'll be discovering new things and our plans will have to be replanned and replanned and replanned again whereas with agile we just don't buy into that lie what we say is we've got an idea of where we're heading but what we think is we should do these things first see what difference they make and then we'll get

on and plan the next thing that we think will make the greatest difference and of course in that way not only are we not promising an artificial certainty but we're not closing out the possibility for innovation either which i think is really important but this takes courage and this is why i got you trying to articulate the benefits because i think this is where that courage starts because the top diagram looks like people are in control and that's what we're up against so i think you have to be ready to articulate there is a different

way and it comes with a lot of benefits i think something else is the courage of about knowing where you need to get to and it should be obvious but it isn't is it we have to take an idea and sort of say right okay what's the bigger picture that we're trying to get to we need to move people away from this idea of articulating every single requirement i want this i want that oh it should be able to do that it's like kids in a sweet shop when we do that instead what we want

is a far more considered approach which is this ultimately what does good look like what are we trying to get to here what should we be able to do in the future that we can't do now no no don't tell me how we're going to do it in the future let's just concentrate for a moment so holding people in that's that creative space which says no don't don't worry about the how don't worry about the mechanics of it let's just debate for a moment what we think our organization should be able to do and perhaps

in this conversation we should talk about are there things that we should retire from doing things that we should stop doing there are certain products that don't bring in as much revenue anymore i had a horrible conversation over the weekend with the ceo um and the finance director which was about retiring out of markets where customers simply were not profitable the problem the reason it was such an uncomfortable conversation is that in this wider end goal of where we were moving the business to we would be leaving behind some organ some customers who were actually

charitable because they were charity themselves and we were behaving very charitably towards them because we were providing an awful lot of services that we weren't charging them full market rate and ultimately we were losing money and i said that's fine they are not in the new picture of who you are targeting as your customer and who is your target market that doesn't mean to say we need to be uncharitable but what i want to do is call out our charitable activities and say right that is part of our corporate social responsibility and it sits over

there and we are funding it differently but let's not muddle it up but of course this this whole idea of end goals are actually full of uncomfortable conversations because i've got to try to to work out what that end goal looks like and we know already that that end goal is likely to shift it shifts in shape so we need to pivot slightly towards it and again it shifts in shape and we need to pivot so i've already said that we need some kind of horizon scanning process but as i just described we need to

have these difficult conversations because what i'm asking people to do is step into a future world and look around and go well this is what we do now so it might be that it's in terms of products and services it might be not exactly how we do it but the bigger picture of what parts of the business do we want to automate where do we think we might be using people where do we think we might be using machines or um robotic process automation or artificial intelligence are we happy with the relationships we have in

our marketplace do we want to develop deeper partnership style relationships with other organizations do we want to maybe push things offshore um do we want to change any aspect of our supply chain what does good look like is is the constant question that sort of underpins all of this that i'm i'm constantly pushing people towards and it's a difficult one because i'm sort of asking them to try to imagine what what's the end goal here but with the caveat and this is what i like about agile changes i'm saying you don't need to get it

perfect first time right we're going to have a conversation about what you think that end goal is and it looks like this blue shape here but actually don't worry if you haven't said everything or you haven't had all the best ideas right now at least we've got some kind of direction from you some kind of destination where we know where we're heading but we also know that that might flex in some way over time and i do think that this therefore the agile in agile change actually provides us with an inbuilt safety net so for

some very difficult conversations about what that end goal looks like so i think that's an important skill to be able to facilitate and and you add real value when you ask these these difficult questions i think the other thing um which we need to sort of think about is that macro to micro is harder than micro macro what on earth am i on about well if i sort of say okay how are we going to do what what what are we going to change and what i get is people go oh we should be able

to do that or we should have that oh it's going to look like that oh we need to include that if i get that sort of requirements led change it's the it's really is it's um micro we build up so little pieces and what we do is we pull them all together don't we until we get the bigger picture that's micro to macro and it's actually how the brain works because if you if i ask you you know um in if you're going to do a task like um maybe uh tidy your room um uh

tidy the house you're going to start saying oh we need to put these things in boxes we need to um we need to tidy all the shells we need to put all of those get those things washed we will come out because we're human with activities all of those micro activities that lead to the macro picture which is will have a tidy room but if instead i ask you to say now hang on you want a tidy room what does that mean to you is that clean or is that decluttered uh is it is the

furniture organized differently so i start to get you to think about the macro picture what i'm getting you to focus in on is a a definite this is this is the end goal i really want rather than the accidental end goal which is the product of lots of little requirements or jam together so if i step back now and think about i want a tidy room i actually think do you know what i want an uncluttered space and that means reorganizing the furniture taking some furniture out so it's not just about a bit of a

tidy up and therefore what i'm doing is trying to create that macro picture that end goal and then what i'm going to do because we're always pressed for time is i'm looking to then decompose that into individual outcomes that would be valuable so maybe the first outcome is to take out a couple of pieces of furniture that aren't used that much if i get stopped in my tracks by something else then i still would have delivered that early return on investment of my time i would have made a difference by at least decluttering a little

bit i didn't get to do moving the other furniture around i did not get to emptying the drawers and getting rid of some of the uh all the things on on on the tops of the tables and having a tidy up i didn't get to do all of those other outcomes but at least i got the first outcome done and it is all about i know i've given you a very simple example but you can see the value in picking those outcomes but the the key skill is being able to take people into that space

that says okay what's this ideal macro picture rather than ending up with an accidental end goal the accident is that it's a product of having added together all of the little ideas but it it wasn't a deliberate decision and therefore it might not be quite the right decision it might not add quite the right value and i think that's a really important piece and what you know if you can get that first level of breakdown done then this next level of breakdown makes more sense so we then break each outcome into new ways of working

and then we break each new way of working into you know its individual tasks but really i think the skill set is that we can do that first level of breakdown and that's what makes a big difference and then finally i think one of the things i'm always interested in is how the brain likes to save energy um and the brain's got lots of shortcuts to do that um but the one of the issues is why are we finding you know why do we find change so hard is because actually our brains don't like having

to constantly make decisions and one of the things that we're trying to make a decision on is what we've just looked at is that having got that breakdown of outcomes we have to decide well which one will we do first and which one comes next and which one after that and that means that i have to take that decision based on business value so of course i'm i'm having to look at all of the benefits and the advantages and the improvements that each outcome will deliver and then make a decision on so we'll go with

this one first but when i get to the end and i've delivered that outcome i have got an idea of what the next one should be but i have to go back and revisit that decision because the world might have changed so i have to go back and decide whether or not based on new information we've got the right thing or do we have to change the order of things so having sort of worked in a prince2 world many many years ago um this traditional project management style and having worked in an agile space for

over 10 years the one thing i still remember is how how ever on if you like however present i need to be in that we only ever get a few weeks into doing something before we ask ourselves the question now that we've done that thing what should we do next there's a constancy to the decision making that is needed in agile to make sure we're always doing the next most valuable thing and that decision making as we know many of us work with people who are experts at procrastinating so i have to spend quite a

lot of time persuading people to take a decision based i provide them with all of the information all the the data that enables them to decide if you like the moscow prioritization what is a must-have what is a should have what is it could have and what is it won't have this time but actually i find that i have to spend a lot of time encouraging them to make those decisions because it feels to them like oh we'll leave it till later till we've got more information it is a that procrastination is a risk-averse approach

my job is to explain to them the risk of not making a decision so what i do is i show them the impact if we do go ahead with creating this outcome but i also show them the impact if they prevaricate and they hold back on taking the decision i show them the impact that this team over here can't do any work because they're still waiting to hear from you and this supplier over here is going to charge us additional fees because we aren't um fulfilling our side of the contract because we haven't taken a

decision so i spend a lot of time trying to almost it's not teach lead decision making because leaders understand how to take decisions but it's having the courage to take that decision and decision making means you select one thing over something else so what you do is when you select one thing what they're scared of is closing out the possibilities of other things and we have to help people get through that i think it's one of the big issues so i think there's that exhaustion of constant decision making that we need to be aware of

and then finally picking up on the point that was raised by somebody saying it's actually easier to get bau done well i think this diagram sort of shares some of the concerns people have with this more agile approach with the the more traditional view we do all of the activities and we only go live once when we've got every single aspect of our project finished and then we go live and that's when we we deal with the change activities whereas in this agile approach on the right hand side we have the initial idea and that

leads to some change the next most valuable idea that leads to some change and then the next one etc etc so we do have far more frequent change and some people are concerned that that volume of change makes people feel as if they haven't got time to sort of uh find their feet they're on shifting sands all of the time because things are changing all the time and it is certainly a conversation i have a lot of sympathy with i was surprised by a client before christmas who said when we were looking at this diagram

and people were talking about a concern over change fatigue that he said there is no such thing as change fatigue if in your private life you're making lots of changes you don't get tired do you it's because you're totally motivated to make those changes because you're deciding to make them so this guy said no there is nothing like change fatigue change fatigue is just the fact that we haven't motivated people properly i thought that's definitely a an interesting perspective and worth sharing my own approach to dealing with multiple changes like this so that people do

not feel that they are so much on shifting sands is how i try to tell a story about all of the changes that are coming up so that people don't feel knocked sideways all the time by something unexpected what i'm trying to do is get that message across that you know i'm i'm currently sort of that change is currently working and there's another one coming and then another one so i think there's something in here about we have to address the danger of too much change however i will say one thing because this is um

occurred to me recently on on something i'm working on that i think the release of incremental changes here on the right hand side actually matches our pace of understanding i'm working on a project that's going to be three years in duration it's a major systems and equipment upgrade for an organization and uh announcing these changes before christmas um uh it was really interesting to staff were obviously in shock and trying to understand what it meant for their jobs and one of the things i could say to them is that i i've made them a promise

basically is that um the emotions that we're currently experiencing um they might pass through like shock and denial and anger and finally acceptance of the changes will actually going to be repeated the reason they're going to be repeated frequently is that as they learn more um and as more details and the changes released to them they'll think more about how their roles will change and they'll they'll go back psychologically through that change again um because we basically the fog keeps lifting doesn't it and we keep making peace with the latest information that we've discovered about

the change and i have made a promise to them that as they are psychologically going through those multiple change curves i'm going to match that with i'm going to give them as soon as as early as possible real tangible change for them to engage with so whenever i can release um new equipment to them whenever i can do a demonstration of a new system capability whenever i can give them early insight into the new ways of working that the organization is bringing on over the next few years i will do that because i think it

will match the pace of their psychological sort of multiple changes they're going to go through and that's gone down a storm so i think we have to be aware that there's multiple changes but that it's not always um a disaster when we do that so this is what i think i think that we need to learn about agile change because i think there's many reasons but um it gives us the early realization and benefits creates real value it creates momentum it creates motivation and it this early delivery and the frequent delivery allows for frequent validation

we're sort of on the right path and that we're doing the right things and that our assumptions are correct and that therefore each wave of change that we create gives us a chance to get feedback um and drives decisions on what the next delivery should be not based on potentially incorrect assumptions but based on real up-to-date understanding of what's happening and i think that by putting things into operational use we are giving people the choice of what to change next based on the evidence of what we've just changed so they're using those results of earlier

deliveries to drive those later prioritization decisions so it's actually much more evidence-based decision making it's less risky and i think this evolving solution of course reflects our changing priorities so i looking at the time what i was going to do was go back and get you to have another go at um this uh what are the benefits of agile change but i think we've we've captured a lot of those um and i hope i've given you food for thought to carry on with that idea of finding out what you think the benefits are so what

i'm going to do is use the last 10 minutes or so to turn it over to mark and pose me any questions that you want to yeah thanks mel great stuff um there's it's actually quite a lot of talk because we're talking a lot about the benefits and there's a couple of questions around you know if we're talking can we sort of leave it out and talk about some of the potential disadvantages so uh might be good to address a couple of those so i'll start with um there's there's a couple that point to the

risk of burnout uh with the you know the volume of of change when it's agile and it could uh could overwhelm well yeah and i think if i just go back to this last diagram i think that um i am very sympathetic to that and i think that um however whilst it is a risk i think that if we're not careful we'll end up playing the game of king knute who tried to sit on his throne and push and tell the waves not to roll onto the sand um i'm afraid the waves keep coming with

it's tidal there's nothing we can do about it so i think that how we ameliorate that risk is that we spend time trying to make the impact of multiple continuous change um as culpable as possible and in fact one of the reasons i founded the continuous change community and and it was named that way is that a lot of what we discuss on those panels is coping strategies and i think that is something that we shouldn't be ignorant of that as part of our change role now we have to and i'm finding this absolutely in

my practice that i have to pull in much more almost um psycho psychological understanding um neuroscientific understanding how the brain works to create meaningful coping strategies so maybe what i'm saying is that we have to open up our the scope of change management to include not just all the implementation activities but a much greater emphasis on emotional coping strategies i'm sure a lot of us already have those in our change plans but now we're expanding them even more thanks well um a couple of couple of people asking can you give some examples of where when

agile might not be the best uh the best approach or most appropriate methodology oh good well i'm on the slide i'm the right slide for it um on the left hand side here if i can um if i know exactly what i'm doing um and there's no choice about it the requirements are so obvious then do absolutely use a traditional approach because if the agile approach is really set up for uncertainty we've never done this before and we don't know how it's going to be received we don't know exactly what we're doing so let's take

it in tiny little steps and move forward on that basis and i think it's really interesting that um therefore agile is is not um it's not just a simple answer it does come with costs i think there are two costs of the diagram on the right-hand side other than the frequent change that we've just talked about and i think the the the first one is that it's the um the cost of feedback at the end of every sort of uh idea being created i am going to put it into operational use um and i am

i'm sourcing feedback what do people think um tell us what your experiences are and that feedback doesn't come for free um when i'm asking people to share their experiences share their results i'm taking them away from their business as usual while they're doing it so feedback is not cost free and there's a lot more feedback to drive our decisions in agile and the second thing is that i often find there are diseconomies of scale because as i move on to the second idea i might have to unpick some of the things that i've done already

so that i can sort of expand it and make it more available to a wider customer base perhaps or include other things in it so i find that i sort of have to maybe unpick a little bit of the work i've previously done so that i can sort of it's ready to go to a wider audience and again that unpicking and having to redo some of the work doesn't come for free either so there are diseconomies of scale and there is the cost of feedback in an agile approach so if you haven't got uncertainty if

you don't need feedback if you don't need to consider how the experience is and whether or not there are other things we should add then just go straight for the traditional approach when i moved house a couple of months ago i have moved house quite a few times so i was able to drive draw up the requirements list i knew of all the things that needed to be done all of the communications with all the utilities the communications with the estate agent uh with the lawyers i knew exactly what was required in terms of there

are you know packing up a room which is you know packing up all the clothes all of the ornaments um all of the books um taking things to the charity shop we don't want any more you can make that list up can't you and you can you can create a plan where you work out the logical order of those things i don't need to keep stopping and going have we got any other ideas about how we'd like to make this packing happen or are there any other things like you'd like me to expand on i

don't need feedback and i don't need to keep um iterating through i just need the job done so traditional approach is the the most cost effective in those circumstances where there's no uncertainty and there's no experimentation needed thanks um here's yeah next one what method or tool do you use to capture and communicate change impacts when there are layer after layer of them in multiple agile sprints okay the most important thing i do is i don't try to centrally control it the most important thing i do is i build a change agent network or change

champion network who are on the ground doing the impact assessment with their colleagues and picking up all of the little impacts and managing them themselves um i think that there is a great deal to be lost if you try to overly control impact assessment because i suppose it's my take on impact assessment i do want to understand what the impact is but i don't just want to leave it at that i want us to then tackle the impact does that impact require us to provide some coaching or training does that impact require us to provide

maybe a test environment that people can practice in do we need to do more explanations of what's going on so i want to not just address the impact just identify the impact but also address it and i have found that the most important thing when there are layers and layers through the organization is that that impact is driven down through those layers by representatives at each of those layers so that's my take on it thanks um next question now i've lost it uh how would you deal or have you come across teams that say they

are agile organizations but really are not and how do you address that um absolutely i meet a lot of teams that tell me their agile because they are having a daily scrum or a daily sprint meeting or whatever you might want to call it and that they're working in sort of two week sprints so they are sort of finishing work every couple of weeks but when i ask the bigger questions which is um and i think this is probably the easiest way to look at it which is that are they working from macro to micro

rather than working micro upwards you find that they're not actually agile at all um and i think this for me is that the fundamental piece of it is that actually they are delivering they think they're delivering incrementally because they're they're doing little bits and pieces but they are not doing it from a more sort of considered response of actually we know the overall end goal we're trying to get to and we have chosen the things that make the biggest biggest business difference the biggest value if you like so they're not doing this the heavy lifting

of agile thinking they're not doing that but what they've got is a few agile ceremonies and then i just work with them to sort of get across how we might do this great thanks i think one yeah one final question before we start to wrap up so how do you contract against changing end goals and changing requirements with agile um i think that um the agile business consortium are actually running a webinar on this um which is because ultimately what you're saying is that if we're going to and i'll just go to i think the

one of the early slides uh this way here which is that what i could do at the top diagram there is obviously contract for every single thing that i might want for my supplier but what i'm doing in an agile approach is i'm effectively saying right i want to cut a contract for the whole end goal but we're going to have to have some flexibility between us here and there's going to have to be a lot of trust between us because i'm absolutely going to purchase all the things i need for this first uh incremental

iteration so to create the first outcome and then i'm going to come back to you for the second outcome but you're absolutely right i'm i'm i'm going to do this as a call-off contract because i'm not paying for everything front so there has to be a huge amount of trust possibly think of it as the opposite to the contract between the eu and astrazeneca um and that's maybe what you're aiming for because i've never seen a contract less trusted in my life than what i'm seeing right now with that one hope that helps um i'm

just going to tidy up and go to the end we've done the questions um here further information um i will say for those of you who are asking me i can see on linkedin right now um that yes i am doing some courses myself i'm doing one in the uk uh or european time zone on 17th 18th of february and then in march i'm doing one um coming up on the uh 11th and 12th of march in the us and canada time zone which means that i finish around one o'clock in the morning so i

don't do those very often but i do do them through the change management review um teresa sets it all up but it does mean that i have to stay up late and i'm a morning person so i make a big sacrifice about once a quarter to do that um but actually if you don't want me to stay up in the middle of the night you can you can take the self-paced online learning i've cut it into lots of sort of 10 minute modules with lots of activities and exercises so you can do it at your

own pace and if you're homeschooling you might probably want to do that option but i hope that helps join the join the tribe that have taken the agile change agent qualification from apmg and just listen to the stuff they're saying about how relevant how practical and how many skills and techniques they've learned that have made a difference so i'm really proud proud to be the chief examiner for that qualification excellent great stuff mel thanks for that you've covered the further info slide for me perfectly so that just leads me to to wrap up so i

would like to thank everyone very much for attending uh do you hope you found it valuable and informative and many thanks as ever to you melanie for your insights and expertise and thanks everyone for sending in the questions and sorry we we we couldn't get to them all in the hour but um we hope you we've answered a few good ones for you um and just a reminder as well that uh i might have made the point at start but um i know off the people joined a few minutes late so we have recorded this

session um and we will be sending up sending out a follow-up follow-up email uh tomorrow morning and mel has been kind enough to put a supporting paper together as well which really is a really good summary of what we've discussed on the webinar today so do look out for that uh in uh tomorrow morning uk time so thanks again everyone thanks again mel uh we have to see you again on future apmd webinars stay safe and enjoy the rest of your week and the weekend ahead bye-bye capture the chat for me please mark and i

will do some articles in linkedin over the next couple of weeks i'll try and do something over the weekend and thank you for the 45 people who've already contacted me and linkedin that's quite a lot have a good evening or afternoon depending on where you are take care everyone bye-bye