Reacting to change is a one key principle that we often remember from agile. We should carefully observe the environment and react if we notice that what we are currently doing no longer serves us.
This is fairly easy when we are developing a software with a small group of people. We can easily decide together what to change, update or even delete from the solution. Then we build what we have decided and implement it. But how does this agile way of developing work when we are developing a new culture, mindset, ways of working or something else that requires changes in people’s behaviour?
When developing an IT solution, it is quite simple to implement the latest change or update to the solution. There is no lead time between the completed new feature and the implementation. We could even simplify and say that implementation happens by pushing a button (remember that if we are really agile, we should not have 6 months testing period or other queues before the release).
If we are carrying out a development project related to ways of working, it requires people to start doing things differently, and we have a lead time between the completed idea = new way of working and its implementation = people acting according to the new way of working every day. This lead time is user adoption process.
People related change goes through user adoption process
As the picture of user adoption process shows, the adoption of the change does not happen in a second like releasing a new feature. People go through different phases before they are ready to act in a new way and implement the change to their everyday habits. This requires time.
There are several steps people go through before they really start acting in a new way. In the beginning it is important to get awareness that something is going on and then understand what is going to happen, especially from the person’s point of view. Only after that you can start adopting and changing the way you act.
People need time for change – too much too often is a mess
The learning is that if we are dealing with people, we should take into account the user adoption process if we want the implementation to happen. In agile world the aim is to implement new things often. But when dealing with people, every time a new idea arises, a new user adoption process starts from the beginning.
So, we should be careful how often we tune the design of our ways of working. The moment we decide to do something a little bit differently we need to remember that implementation requires communication first and after that starts the user adoption process inside each person. This happens every time we introduce something new. If the direction changes too often the organisation cannot follow, and a mess is created. The result is that in the end we are changing nothing. In addition, we can see the results of our new idea only after some time. Only then we can say did it work or not.
Although, agile encourages failing fast. We should ensure before making any conclusions of our failure or success, that we really succeeded in the implementation. Especially in large organisations the implementation takes time. The larger the organisation is, the more time the implementation requires because even the basic communication that creates awareness takes surprisingly lots of time inside a large organisation. It is important to find the suitable speed for introducing new ideas inside the company.
What to do to speed up the change implementation?
There is certainly something you can do to speed up the implementation. The way to shorten the lead time or even eliminate it entirely is to make the change together with people. When you cooperate with the people who will be affected by the change, the user adoption steps already start during the ideation / development work. If the ideas for the change come from people themselves, maybe the first steps of user adoption might even disappear.
In large organisations, you can probably never reach the point where you could do the change together closely with 2 000 or even 10 000 people at the same time. Thus, there will always be people who will start the user adoption process from the beginning after the first communication.
So, remember to ensure the communication, engagement, coaching, training, and other support for the people affected by the change when being agile. This is how you shorten the lead time that we would of course like to be as short as possible in agile. That is how you ensure that the implementation will really happen in the end. This is what we call people driven change.
Here is one reference where we have taken the user adoption process into account in an agile world (available in Finnish): SOK ITD – Toimintamallin muutos – Gofore
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