AgileChangeManagement Limited<\/a>, provides advice on how to broach the topic of agile with senior members of management.<\/em><\/p>\nFor decades the world of project management has been dominated by traditional, sequential, \u201cwaterfall\u201d approaches. Now, increasing numbers of individuals and organisations are turning to agile methods and frameworks to manage projects more effectively.<\/p>\n
No longer confined to product development and IT & software development projects, agile approaches have become popular with a wide variety of organisations that need to be more flexible and responsive as the pace of change continues to increase. It can be difficult \u2013 and indeed frustrating \u2013 trying to encourage senior management to adopt a new way of working, whether it\u2019s simply an overarching resistance to change, or concerns about myths sometimes attributed to agile.<\/p>\n
The following points, in no particular order of importance, can help when discussing agile with the senior management team.<\/p>\n
The devil is the detail<\/h2>\n
Avoid going into depth about what agile is and how agile works. This can create the impression that an agile approach is complex and specialist i.e. not easy to adopt. Leave out the detailed language and complex terminology. Create a high level story that addresses the key issues as seen at senior management level and not at the user level.<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t position agile as the only solution.<\/h2>\n
Business has seen lots of different approaches come and go, things like business process engineering, for example. For the sake of credibility, it\u2019s more helpful and more persuasive to explain that agile is a way of working that can align with other approaches.<\/span><\/p>\nWhat can agile do for me?<\/h2>\n
Take a leaf from any good salesperson\u2019s book – everything you say has to connect to the interests and concerns of those you are selling to. Be empathetic. Senior managers will want to know how this approach can help them achieve strategic objectives, how it will ease their management concerns and, from an overarching point of view, alignment with corporate objectives.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nAlign agile to corporate objectives<\/h2>\n
Senior management\u2019s key concerns can be boiled down as follows \u2013 how does agile help here?<\/p>\n
1. Cost reduction<\/em><\/h3>\nAgile approaches can lower the cost of initiatives. In more traditional approaches, there is a lot of up front, detailed planning that needs to be paid for before anything is produced. Also, if these plans need to be reworked as circumstances change, there is an additional overhead. Agile approaches involve the incremental development of the final deliverable, therefore the risk of building the \u2018wrong\u2019 thing is reduced \u2013 an overall cost saving.<\/p>\n
2. Revenue increase<\/em><\/h3>\nAgile approaches usually see a return on investment earlier in the lifecycle as more features and functions are made available to customers. Early delivery can also generate higher levels of customer satisfaction because customers are getting what they need earlier. In turn, customers are able to give early feedback helping to shape later iterations and increasing customer satisfaction. In a product lifecycle, earlier to market can give a competitive edge in sales and revenue.<\/p>\n