‘Responding to Change’ over ‘following a Plan’ — my learnings from Agile
I joined Hotels.com a few months ago, after a career break of 9 months. This bought about a lot of positive changes in my life, while all the beautiful memories, experiences and values form the past remained intact. From being a QA Engineer with 8 years experience I started my new journey as a Scrum Master. In addition, I moved from London to Rome, with little job security or financial stability. But thankfully my Agile background made the transition easier.
Change is inevitable. Political, environmental, psychological, physical or the ones related to our careers, diets, practices, beliefs, the list is endless. It is not always easy to deal with these changes. Sometimes change can be very scary because it takes you into something unknown, takes something away you. It may have been what made you comfortable. You may have loved the way things were. Even if you know the change is needed, you may grieve what was left behind.
The reaction varies from excitement to fear, over enthusiasm to confusion, numbness to anger, resentment or a confusing mixture of all these emotions. And that’s cause something somewhere goes off track, off plan. These changes are usually beyond our control. However, we always have the ability to control how we respond.
Our attitude to change determines how we embrace it. That’s where the Agile philosophy comes in. An approach that helps you react differently to the way people normally react. It takes effort. And practice. But it makes the adaptation easier.
I would like to share how the Agile philosophy could be inspirational, and I hope you find it helpful in your own transition.
Reactions to Change
Unfamiliarity
More often than not, change can be disorienting. Everything is going as per plan, you are in your comfortable, familiar space and suddenly, you are required to you embrace something unexplored. You don’t know what to feel, which means you don’t know how to respond. You close yourself off and start ignoring your thoughts, avoiding to come to terms with the new situation.
Agile is open to change throughout the development process. It is based on the assumption that circumstances change. It moulds our mind-set to embrace change as a natural and expected part of development. It shifts the focus from preventing change, to managing expectations, accessing risks, measuring impact and tracking changes.
This helps you to:
- fully accept and identify with your changed circumstances as like it or not; you cannot control it
- fight your internal resistance to change by having an open mind
- manage your feelings by shaping your response in a positive manner
- examine opportunities that could be explored
- move forward with the knowledge and value that you have gained so far
Uncertainty
Adjusting to changes is not always easy. Fear comes in many different forms. There are a variety of things that we are afraid of. But the one we would all agree on experiencing, is the fear of failure. It is the emotional, cognitive reaction to the outcome you predict for failing to achieve a goal. It makes you weak, reluctant to think creatively. Brings about a lot of negative thoughts and makes you feel blocked.
Fail Fast, Fail Cheap, Fail Often — the agile approach to accept uncertainty, and to test your ideas, problems, and solutions as quickly, cheaply, and often as possible — with the understanding that many of these ideas might fail. However, without testing new ideas, you’ll either invest too much (time, money, effort) into the wrong things, or you’ll never bring those challenging and inventive ideas to market. So, your focus should be on failing fast, failing cheap, and failing often.
This helps you to:
- accept that not all ideas are good but that shouldn’t restrict your exploration process
- understand that failures and false starts are totally acceptable
- start honest discussions by giving dynamic and convincing reasons
- fail an idea earlier in the process by making the best use of available resources and opportunities
- pursue only those ideas that deliver the greatest value
Confusion
You have accepted the change in it’s full glory but now your head is exploding trying to figure out how to address the million thoughts going through your head. Where do you even begin. How do you comprehend the situation in its complexity. Everything looks fuzzy.
A product roadmap communicates how a product is likely to evolve across several major releases. It captures requirements at a high level by describing the journey you want to take your product on, split over the next few months. You distinguish the things that are a little bit fuzzy from the things that you’ve already committed to for the short term.
This gives you:
- a high level plan that only sketches out the major stages of the upcoming journey
- a high level, visual representation of your goals
- a format to track your progress
- flexibility to incorporate enforceable changes
- the ability to visualise the big picture
Acceptance and moving on
Change is a slow process. Even after you think that you have crossed the initial hurdles, you could still find yourself stranded on unknown grounds.
Agile advocates breaking down features into small pieces known as “user stories.” These stories are then scored relatively using”story points” based on their complexity. Once the team begins development and the project is tracked, data is available to measure the project velocity, therefore enabling more precise forecasting of requirements and timelines. IT supports small, continuous, incremental, and iterative releases.
It teaches you to:
- accept that you are still adapting to the new reality that faces you
- break down your bigger goals into smaller, easily attainable tasks
- put your energies on the present things
- try to prioritise completing tasks that are in your control
- take note of your progress and your bottlenecks
All in all, when you spend time to Reflect on a situation with the right attitude, you learn how to Respond more thoughtfully!
