I wrote the first Agile Change Handbook in 2014 and the second edition in 2021, with thousands having gained the Agile Change Agent certification. The number of people taking this course and recommending it to their colleagues tells me how incredibly popular the Agile Change approach is.
What is exciting is even greater interest in the Agile Change approach, because of the acceleration of AI initiatives leading to even more uncertainty. The Agile Change techniques, especially the Agile Change Roadmap are designed especially for initiatives where the path to achieving the vision is uncertain.
There is a simple reason, Agile Change techniques are ways to plan, manage and achieve change incrementally, in bite sized pieces as quickly as possible. This speed is not just because we want to realise benefits as soon as possible – true, we do! But the sooner we adopt a new way of working, the sooner we understand the impact it will have and the new opportunities it gives us.
Using Agile Change techniques short-cuts the feedback loop, delivering real experience of how the change works in practice very early in the lifecycle. This means it helps to create certainty; we have real results to base decisions on about what is working and what is not, and therefore, what we need to build on and what we need to change. Agile Change is an approach specifically developed to address uncertainty – and the change projects that involve AI are full of uncertainty because AI is so new that we don’t have a clear understanding of its capabilities. We need to be willing to experiment and to flex in response to new information as we discover it.
The techniques in the Agile Change Agent course create an initial flexible, incremental plan and can be re-used as we re-plan in response to new information. The course includes simple prioritisation techniques that we can share with everyone involved in the change so that they can take part in sharing their views and helping to decide what to do first that will deliver the greatest value.
The Agile Roadmap provides a simple, repeatable structure and was designed to be used by everyone, not just those with a background in project planning. There are 2 parts to the plan:
Part 1 sets aside some time to clarify the scope of the change, understand the vision and create a strategy for who to work with, how to engage stakeholders, what techniques to use, how to take decisions, track and share progress with everyone involved. The most important task is to break the vision for the change into individual components or outcomes, each of which can be delivered through focused effort over a few weeks. This incremental approach allows for feedback to be actioned before starting the next wave of change.
Part 2 is formed of a 3-step repeatable process:
Each of these steps ensures that what needs to be done is co-designed with everyone involved and the decisions on the priority of the work are a collaboration, increasing commitment and motivation as the decision on what is the most important, urgent work is decided together. This increases the feeling of team spirit, as everyone knows why they are doing what they are doing and why it is needed now and cannot be left until later. These criteria give structure to your change because they are applied to everything that is happening. Examples of these criteria include changes that fix the greatest number of problems or the highest value failures. Changes that create new results, new services, simplifies or streamlines how work is done; changes that make it possible for other changes to take place, creating the right conditions for other new ideas to happen.
No work starts until everyone is clear about what good looks like, so the ‘acceptance criteria’ which identify on what basis work will be ‘accepted as complete’. As the change is implemented, and new ways of working are adopted, the reaction of those affected and the results of working in the new way are measured, and used as feedback to decide what to do next.
It is this continuous questioning of what needs to happen next that is so well suited to AI-based change initiatives. AI is so new that there are lots of unexpected impacts, side effects, additional changes, and new discoveries. Agile Change is an approach which seeks these out and celebrates their identification, recognising that including them makes the next wave of change more relevant, more useful and more practical. It is no surprise that demand for these Agile planning and prioritisation techniques is now in high demand.
Join me on my next Agile Change Agent course to learn these skills for yourself so you can increase your voice and contribution to the changes taking place in your work.
