Responding to Change

Jim Highsmith - September 2, 2009

Jim Highsmith is co-author of the Agile Manifesto with 60 years of experience as an IT manager, product manager, project manager, consultant, software developer, and agile pioneer.

Agile Change Management ProjectsAtWork

Agile project leaders expect change and respond accordingly rather than follow outdated plans. In practice, they “envision-explore” versus “plan-do” — they understand the limits of anticipating and trust more in their ability to adapt their processes and practices as necessary.

In Artful Making, Harvard Business School professor and colleague Rob Austin and his coauthor Lee Devin discuss a $125 million IT project disaster in which the company refused to improvise and change from the detailed plan set down prior to the project’s start. “ ‘Plan the work and work the plan’ was their implicit mantra,” they write. “And it led them directly to a costly and destructive course of action.... We’d all like to believe that this kind of problem is rare in business. It’s not.”

Every project has knowns and unknowns, certainties and uncertainties, and therefore every project has to balance planning and adapting. Balancing is required because projects also run the gamut from production-style ones in which uncertainty is low, to exploration-style ones in which uncertainty is high. Exploration-style projects require a process that emphasizes envisioning and then exploring into that vision rather than detailed planning and relatively strict execution of tasks. It’s not that one is …

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