The relationship between Change Management and Agile

[Al Shalloway]

I just ready Jason Little’s old blog about the the intersection of Change Management and Agile (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-pronounce-you-partner-jason-little).

Ignoring the marriage analogy, anyone have opinions about the relationship between Change Management and Agile? Have we in the Lean-Agile community taken all we can from Change Management or should we be pulling in more? Is one “camp” a subset of the other? Should it be?

[Al Shalloway]

I ‘grew up’ professionally at Accenture (then Andersen Consulting) in the 90’s, and even back then their model was four quadrants: People, Process, Technology, and Strategy.

The names changed over the years (‘People’ became ‘Change Management’) but the basic idea didn’t change: if you didn’t address all of those things in an initiative, you were doomed.

As someone relatively new to the Agile world, I’ll defer to others on what the true current thinking of the community is on Agile vs. (or with) Change Management. But I have found myself thinking of Lean-Agile as having brought a major revolution to software development over the past decade or so by insisting that ‘Technology’ not be done without full inclusion of ‘(business) Process’ and ‘Strategy’.

But Change Management still seems to be, at the least, a less emphasized and not equal partner with the others. There still seems to be work to be done, IMHO, to see true integration of the people focus of CM into the wider software development community and paradigms. While there’s a good deal of talk of the importance of people in the Agile world, actual practical advice on how to integrate respect for people and the lessons CM has learned over decades seems to be more the exception than the rule.

But clearly some are thinking of it — Al’s blog post from a few weeks back(Agile Says Respect People: Lean Shows How) comes to mind …

[Author]

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