Change Management Strategies for Agile Digital Transformations

agile is a big trend in the software development space as well as the digital transformation deployment space but it's also becoming a trend in the change management world as well so is agile and change management something that goes well together that's what i'm going to talk about here today [Music] my name is eric kimberling i'm the ceo of third stage consulting we're an independent consulting firm that helps clients throughout the world reach their third stages of digital transformation success and agile is a big buzzword it's a big development and trend in the digital transformation space software developers are using agile as a way to develop better software even software implementation teams are using agile as a way to deploy technology faster and naturally change management teams are following suit and trying to find ways to use agile and incorporate agile concepts into their change management strategies and approaches but as appealing as agile is and can be to organizations it's not always the best thing for change management initiatives so what i want to do today is talk about the pros and the cons of agile and i'm actually going to start off by talking about what agile is as well as whether or not it's something you should consider for your change initiative to start it helps to summarize what exactly agile is and to understand agile it helps to back up and look at what led us to this path of agile and if we look back 10 or 20 years in the past software deployments were becoming big and bloated they used a waterfall approach which is a more sequential approach to developing and deploying software and in that waterfall approach you would define all of your business requirements up front get the user sign off on business requirements then you would start designing the software then you'd start building it then you would test it and go through that process fairly sequentially sounds natural enough but the problem with waterfall developments was that they were becoming bloated they were taking a long time they were costing a lot of money and it was taking a long time to get to value realization of those solutions so as often happens in the world of digital transformation in many other aspects of our lives the pendulum swang from waterfall to the other extreme which is agile and so agile was meant to be a response to the fact that waterfall was having some difficulties with value realization so to summarize agile deployments are more iterative and more rapid instead of having a sequential milestone-based stage gate based approach to deploying software agile focuses on just getting some functionality out there getting stuff out there for people to throw darts at to respond to and you iteratively pivot and adjust based on feedback from those solutions that are rolled out quickly to the organization so on one hand agile has addressed some of the challenges and some of the dark sides of waterfall but at the same time they've unintentionally introduced some additional risks and some additional challenges and downsides to that approach so what i want to do today is talk about the things you should consider as it relates to agile as you're developing your change management strategy and plan [Music] one of the most foundational aspects of a successful change strategy and plan is change impacts and change impact is a way to define how exactly people's jobs are going to change as a result of new technological and business process improvements and one of the problems with agile as it relates to change impact is that agile is meant to quickly get software rolled out to the organization even if it's to a small group a pilot group or just a small functional area within a larger organization the whole concept of agile is to deploy software quickly and to iteratively adjust and improve that software as it's being deployed now the problem with this as it relates to change management is that it creates somewhat of a moving target as you're trying to define how this technology is going to impact people's jobs and if we can't help people understand effectively how their job is going to change we haven't done our job very well as change management consultants so the tricky part and the risk of agile change management approaches as it relates to change impact is that we have to figure out how to define and articulate what the change impacts are going to be as technology is being deployed and there's a high risk of us being behind the curve and being too late to the game to identify what those change impacts are and so that's something that we have to figure out is how to better intertwine and help us get ahead of these agile deployments so that we're leading with the people rather than leading with the technology [Music] now the next challenge with agile deployments as it relates to change management is organizational design and every effective organizational change strategy i've been a part of effectively looks at organizational design and defines how jobs are going to be designed how we're going to restructure reorganize roles and responsibilities somewhat similar to change impact but more focused on individual job roles and responsibilities so here's where we define if someone's going to have x percent of their job automated what are we going to do with that x percent of that person's job the problem with agile deployments is almost that the technology is moving so fast that we're not able to adequately think through those sorts of strategic issues of how we can organize ourselves and what is it we want to be when we grow up organizationally before we roll off the technology so again as is the case with change impact that we just discussed what ends up happening is we end up coming in late to define what the organizational structure may be or what the new organizational design may be after technology's already been rolled out to the organization which is a problem and again the whole theme here that you're going to hear as we talk through this is that people and the change management aspect of any digital transformation is typically on the critical path that's typically the thing that's either going to slow down or speed up your deployment depending on how well you do change management and if we're not doing change management well that's going to slow down the overall deployment even if we're rolling out technology faster than we might have done in a waterfall type of environment so this is something else we have to think through and address as part of our change strategies in agile related environments [Music] overall business and stakeholder alignment is a critical part of an effective organizational change strategy and if we're deploying technology faster that we can define the change impacts and the organizational design and some of the other things i'm still going to talk about in this video then we haven't adequately addressed this whole alignment issue to ensure that we're all aligned and on the same page with what this transformation is what it means to the organization and ultimately what the impact of the organization is so for example oftentimes there are strategic goals and objectives that an organization wants to accomplish as a result of its digital transformation and these are very clear strategic goals and objectives that align with the overall goals and objectives of the organization if we don't have that sort of alignment we haven't worked through what it is we want to be when we grow up and how we want to accomplish our goals and objectives using this digital transformation then that's going to be a problem it doesn't matter how good the technology is or how advanced or sophisticated the technology may be if it doesn't align with our overall goals and objectives as an organization we've got misalignment and we're losing value on that deployment so in other words the money and time we save by deploying technology quickly is quickly canceled out by the fact that we're not aligned and we're not getting business value out of that technology so in order to be successful we have to figure out ways to ensure that we have that alignment and we spend the time up front to gather and gain that alignment before we start rolling out new technologies to the organization [Music] one of the appealing aspects of agile digital transformations is that we can roll out technology and not have to wait to define and and business processes and business requirements and do other activities that sometimes can take a lot of time to get that sort of alignment internally however many organizations if not most organizations are going through their digital transformation because they want to integrate their end-to-end business processes they want better integration better alignment of their processes across the enterprise and if we're focused on getting technology out to the organization quickly we're not necessarily taking that time and we're probably not taking that time up front to get our business processes defined and refined the way we want them to be before we start deploying technology from our change management perspective this is a problem because if we don't have clarity and alignment on what our end-to-end business processes are going to be people are not going to accept and adapt to those changes nearly as quickly as if we did take the time to adjust and to ensure that we've addressed what that and then business process model and target operating model should look like so here again is another example where we have to make sure that we're not going so far down the path of agile that we're neglecting this important end-to-end business process flow component of a digital transformation [Music] once we're knee-deep in any sort of digital transformation one of the core executional tasks within change management is typically training and communications this is where we communicate what the changes are why we're going through the process we start to train people on the new processes and the new technologies and other aspects of change management and within training communications we need to have pretty good clarity on all the other things that we've just talked about the change impacts the organizational design what the end-to-end process flows are going to look like all that stuff that i've already talked about those are all prerequisites to being able to effectively do training and communications as we get further into the digital transformation if we haven't done those things effectively up front we're going to be again in a situation where we're behind the curve as a change management team we're taking aim at a moving target because the technology is being developed and iterated by technical people working directly with end users and that can become a problem from a change management perspective where we really lose a lot of the value that you get from change management from a people an adoption and a business value perspective so here again we need to think about how do we integrate and how do we ensure that we can get enough clarity and slow down just enough in an agile environment to be sure that we've defined what the impacts of the organization are and that we're communicating to people what they need to hear and what they need to know about their jobs and the future state business processes and that we're also training people in a way that ensures that they fully understand these technologies before they just get rolled out or forced down the organization's throat [Music] so this all begs the question how do we align change management with agile types of deployments and there's three things i can think of that will really help you as you get started on your agile transformation from a change perspective first is to recognize that agile versus waterfall the two extremes that i talked about at the beginning of this video is not necessarily an all or nothing proposition so in other words you're not choosing agile or waterfall typically you're choosing something in between or at least you should be choosing something in between you don't necessarily want either extreme so the idea here is to figure out where you actually want to fall on the continuum of agile versus waterfall it may be that you lean pretty heavily towards agile but it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going all in on the agile approach in the same way a software development company would in a digital transformation there are things you have to do to make sure your organization's aligned and so in that case you may want to back off a little bit from that whole agile extreme that i've talked about so far in this video second is to make sure that you don't lose sight of your overall corporate goals and objectives and if you don't fully understand and the team doesn't fully understand what the corporate goals and objectives are and how this digital transformation aligns with those corporate goals and objectives then you want to make sure that you take the time to do that before you start designing and building and deploying new technologies and finally it's important to recognize and remember that sometimes you can slow down in order to speed up later so in other words it may be that you do take the time to map out your end-to-end business processes i know that's so anti-agile and it's more of a waterfall type of mentality but sometimes you need that sometimes you need to take that time to get that alignment and then certainly when it comes time to deploy technology after you have that alignment you can take all the agile approaches you want and you're actually going to be able to be more agile and more effective in your agile deployments because you have that clarity up front so it goes back to the first point if it's not an all or nothing proposition you can pick and choose bits and pieces of waterfall bits and pieces of agile to create the digital transformation strategy and plan that makes the most sense for your organization what i will say is that the bigger of a change that you envision for this transformation in other words if you're making a quantum leap from an old mainframe legacy system now you're going to go to a fully baked cloud or sas system that's a big jump and companies are taking a big leap like that in their transformations are more likely to need to take more time up front to define what those processes are going to be and then what the impact of the organization is and what the overall change strategy is if you're used to change you've been through a lot of deployments in the past you're taking more of an incremental approach to your transformation maybe you lean a little bit more heavily towards agile you may not completely throw out everything that relates to waterfall but you may take more of an agile approach so those are just a few things to think about a few ways to think about how you can co-exist in the world of change management along with agile environments and for more information about change management best practices i encourage you to download our guide to organizational change management i've included a link to that below and that provides a lot of change management best practices whether you're in an agile environment or not these change management best practices are meant to help you through your digital transformation and i've also included a number of links and resources below so i encourage you to check that out below so i hope you found this information useful hope you have a great day

Channel: Digital Transformation with Eric Kimberling

Views: 11,241

Keywords: what is agile, waterfall developments, organizational change impacts, org design, business alignment, process integration, training and communications, agile alignment, Change management strategies, Change management strategy, Digital Transformation

Id: VkZw9ZfmkE8

Length: 13min 55sec (835 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 13 2022