Smoothing the Path to Agile

In ‘We’re Moving to Agile…’ I briefly discussed the importance of pragmatically applying methodologies and the underlying factors that may cause a business to struggle with this. Although there are many potential stumbling blocks which may affect your success,  I think there are 3 which are foundational.

Use Joined Up Thinking

We know our businesses are complex with a lot of inter-relationships between different teams and functions. Yet when we implement a new methodology we often only look at the team who will be using it day to day because this makes the change simpler. Frequently this is the technical delivery or development team, but if we think about the end to end process of delivering new capability to our business or a new offering to market, there are a number of other teams involved at different stages. To be successful consider the impact on these too.

Educate the Team

The point of introducing a new methodology is to solve a business problem by changing how part(s) of your business operate. To do this effectively, team members and managers need to understand  their new responsibilities and the behaviours they need to show to fulfil these. If we don’t include this in the transition, existing behaviours will be re-badged using new terminology and the desired change won’t take place.

Manage the Transition

As humans we naturally resist change, and changing work behaviour is difficult.  There is a large body of evidence that shows that businesses who have successfully achieved this have invested the time and effort to manage the transition. Successful management of this is different to that required for a more traditional, technically centred project, and will require a slightly different experience set. 

At Pragmatist Consulting we believe that people are at the heart of all change projects, and that equipping them to meet the evolving nature of business is central to fulfilling their potential and achieving your business objectives. Contact us to understand more about our approach to successful business change.

Pragmatist Consulting provides a pragmatic, emotionally intelligent business and change consultancy service which we tailor to meet your needs. We focus on helping you turn your business problem into a success story.

4 March 2020