Digital transformation’s fundamental change management mistake

Large organizations will go beyond ideation workflows, vision statement writing, and developing roadmaps to value stream mapping to help connect strategy with execution, delivery, and change management. Value stream mapping can be an important tool to help illustrate to employees the value of their work.

“Savvy digital transformation leaders will rely on value stream mapping to familiarize each decision-maker and stakeholder with how the technology works every step of the way, demonstrating a clear vision of what it can do for the business and the individual,” says Paul Wnek, founder and CEO of ExpandAP. “A digital trailblazer’s best chance for success happens when they consider all the stakeholders they will touch and approach each stakeholder’s concerns separately.”

Agile teams must commit to change management during sprints

Change management isn’t just the product manager’s responsibility. They should set expectations for their agile teams on simplifying end-user adoption.

Agile and scrum methodologies put most of the emphasis on delivery activities when teams focus on completing user stories every sprint. Product owners and scrum masters must also engage the team in planning activities, including writing user stories, estimating work, and grooming backlogs.

John Ottman, executive chairman of Solix Technologies, says, “Beyond driving the cadence, orchestration, and ceremony of the scrum, the scrum master needs to work closely with product owners to validate that the epics, users stories, and tasks are all clear and properly documented such that the expected outcomes meet the expectations of each sprint.”

Documentation and well-written user stories guide teams in completing the work and meeting requirements. They can also be used in change management activities when product owners share the requirements with stakeholders, subject matter experts, and employees participating in user acceptance testing.

Showing end-users all the details in a user story can be overwhelming, so agile teams should look to simplify them to support change management activities. Tools such as Atlassian Confluence can pull sections of user stories from Jira Software so that product owners can simplify the presentation. Another option is to use a generative AI tool to summarize the user stories completed in a sprint and to aid in writing release notes. The best option is when the product team reviews requirements in open sprint review sessions, inviting key stakeholders and end-users to attend.

Taking this one step further, I like to see agile teams take on change management activities as another form of work they commit to every sprint. This should include participating in training activities, interviewing end-users, reviewing performance metrics, and capturing other forms of feedback they can use to improve their work. 

Devops must not undermine change management

How often should agile teams release code into production?

Many teams adopting devops best practices have automated their deployment pipelines with CI/CD,  implemented continuous testing, and are confident in their security and operations to implement continuous deployment.

The automation improves quality and reduces toil, but frequent deployments may not be ideal for end-users and can burden change management activities. Devops teams must consider the impact on end-users, and they have several options to reduce affecting end-users with too many changes.

Below are four devops recommendations for increasing deployment frequency without complicating change management and negatively impacting end-users.

• Automate continuous deployment for only small fixes and minor changes that have a low impact on end-users and minimal change management requirements.
• Instill a more controlled release management process when deployments change workflow, user interfaces, and new capabilities.
• Create feature flags and decide which users can provide early feedback on a new capability before rolling it out to more people.
• Leverage canary releases and control rolling out new capabilities to small user segments.

Ottman adds, “By implementing new features to a selected, small part of the users first so they may test it and provide feedback, assurance may be gained that once the change is accepted, the update will be successful for the entire user base.”

Change management practices are integral to delivering business results from digital transformation initiatives. To ease adoption, CIOs and digital trailblazers should look to fit change management practices into their digital operating models so that end-users learn, experience, and adopt changes through all phases of the journey.