Agile Change Management

John D’Entremont, PMP, is a program manager with over 15 years experience in training, managing training teams and designing materials to enhance the skills of managers and executives.

  Agile   Change Management   Scrum   ProjectsAtWork  

While all project planning should account for the possibility of change, Agile projects live by it. They can also die by it if team members don’t embrace change as part of the process and work collaboratively to manage it.

In Agile, change management is a key factor in the life of a project — it is assumed that requirements will evolve throughout the project life cycle. Team members have to embrace this concept as part of their specific roles, while facing evolving tasks. Project teams have to respond to change requests quickly, and be able to implement them on the fly. Stakeholders provide ongoing feedback to these updates, and the results that are derived from them. Speeding up these product enhancements can have the positive result of costs being decreased.

Agile advocates a streamlined, flexible approach, with the goal of rapid delivery of executable milestones. Development is viewed as an incremental and iterative process, with short feedback cycles. Projects teams are empowered to identify and correct problems in an informal manner. Identifying the minimum number of people that need to approve a change, results in less formal authorization, and minimized documentation.

One of the main tenets of Agile is that change management should be collaborative. Ideally, project teams will work together in the same location, maximizing face to face communication. …

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