What is missing in driving change management in an agile setting?

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• “Agile is all the rage at the moment in driving change and transformation. There are many who call out the importance of stakeholder management, communicating regularly, ensuring strong sponsorship and clarity of business requirements. Others emphasize on the need to have continual people interactions versus documentation and processes. For the uninitiated all of these seem to make sense, but yet not that different compared to using other methodologies in other projects. One of the key tenants of agile involves releasing a series of smaller changes rapidly, learning and adjusting from each release, rather than spending a longer time to work on a much bigger release that may or may not be successful. However, releasing a series of changes can be unsettling, disruptive and hard to keep up for employees. This is especially the case for larger programs when the timeline could go for more than 1 year. Combining several programs together, and you can imagine the unsettling rather of these changes on employees and the business. How do we resolve this? The key is to provide a strong picture of the end state and how things will look like and set the expectation that there will be a series of changes, providing examples of these as well as explaining why this is an effective way to drive change. Yes We may not know exactly the details of the end state, but the business should be clear in the overall outcomes and key works to get there. To do this effectively we need to be able to connect the dots and tell the story of the journey of change and how the different changes connect together to lead us to the end state. Sounds simple? Yet lots of companies are not able to reach this outcome due to a big pipeline of changes. The solution? Use digital means connect the dots and not rely on personal interpretation. Use a digital tool to examine what is coming down the pipeline, and therefore create meaning and better prioritize initiatives to move the business forward.”