Agile Change vs Waterfall Change: What's the difference?

What’s the difference between managing change in Agile versus Waterfall? Do you do it in the middle of each sprint or each sprint? This comes up a lot. And I don't go heaps into the detail between Agile and Waterfall (definitely check out Natasha Redman, Jen Frahm, and Lena Ross if you want to deep dive into Agile Change Management). But essentially Agile is a way of working or a project methodology and Waterfall is a different project methodology, and which methodology or way of working is being used can affect the way that people expect you to plan and deliver change. 

At a really high-level:

• In Waterfall, you plan, design, build, deliver everything as a full solution and then you launch in one big bang, then wrap and close.
• In Agile, you plan holistically, and then you go through iterations of deeper planning, designing, building, testing, launching of features as a cycle, then repeat (planning creating, building, testing, launching) until you’ve delivered all of what’s required, then you might wrap and close.

What type of Agile? 

The expectations on how you’ll manage change really depends on what your organisation or project is doing and how they're working Agile because Agile is not a one-size-fits-all. 

• Are they doing it through MVPs (Minimum Viable Products) where maybe every three months something gets released as an MVP (a working solution but with just a base of features)?
• Are they doing two-weekly sprints and you're expected to fall in line. 
• Is it an organisational way of working rather than a project delivery approach? 

The type of agile working can influence the way you plan and lead the change. 

For example:

• For MVPs, you might just treat every MVP as a mini-launch and have all your change activity gearing up to each launch (being sure to let them know what the future MVPs plan to deliver down the track so they get the full forward view and timeline and don’t feel shortchanged by the earlier launch).
• If it's more iterative and something's being released every fortnight, that's where you might want to try and encourage people to self-serve instead and tell people that resources, information and training will be coming out every fortnight and pull them to regularly check a hub or SharePoint to self-serve so that you are not constantly bombarding them with communications and training.
• For the organisational way of working, it might mean you need to liaise and plan with different teams in a specific way.

Leading your change and aligning to ways

When managing and leading your change, there will likely be some key change deliverables you’ll do regardless, such as an overall Impact Assessment and getting your head around the change regardless of what sprint or iteration you’re in. You might decide that in Sprint 1 you’ll do Change Impact Assessment and Sprint 3 will be Change Plan Workshop and align to how they’re planning it and working agile. As Change practitioners, we want to support the ways of working and be good advocates and role models for what the organisation or project has decided and agreed upon as ways of working. It's really about understanding how they're going to work. And you could just go, “I’m going to put key change deliverables in particular sprints and then on a regular basis these would be the things that I would deliver each sprint.” For example, for fortnightly sprints you might deliver a fortnightly newsletter that has links to communications, training and checklists for the coming release to minimise the fatigue and overload because of the frequency of features being brought out.

Take a Minimum Viable approach to your change leadership too!

The most beautiful thing about my Leading Successful Change program is that you learn fit-for-purpose change. It’s easy then to know that you only do the tasks and the deliverables that are actually going to add value in that sprint. You don't have to do everything end-to end. You don't have to tick every box, you don't have to use every tool. You might see that they’re doing Big Room Planning to plot out the next three months and from a Change perspective you’ll support that. You can pick and choose everything. And I really say when you learn fit-for- purpose change, you're learning agile change because I promote picking and choosing what's going to work and add value. And this is really the foundation of Agile: you want to be adding value consistently as frequently and as quickly as possible.

Embrace co-designing 

A great principle in Agile is co-creation and co-design with users, and you can absolutely help make this happen in Change by letting them know their feedback from earlier MVPs or sprints will help determine what will be built in and launch in later MVPs and sprints. This can help people have more ownership, feel more empowered and potentially even decide on release sequences based on what would give the most value to people first.

In a couple of hours, I’ll be wrapping up my Leading Successful Change Live training held in Sydney yesterday and today. It’s been amazing cohort of passionate Changies and we’ve learned and grown together as we’ve put change delivery into practice through the course. 

If you couldn’t join us live in Sydney, don’t fret!

You can join the online version Leading Successful Change from anywhere in the world at any time and get instant access to the course, private community and coaching calls. 

Lata xx