Using the roadmap

The roadmap to identify and control all of the activities needed to successfully implement agile change:

Iterations – Decomposing your change into a series of smaller pieces of work that can be carried out one after the other until a new ‘business as usual’ has been created;

Processes – Collaborating together the activities needed to achieve an important aspect of the change into processes that when joined together define the chain of events from initial idea to successful implementation.

The roadmap sets out what to do but not how to do it, as these skills and techniques are explained in subsequent chapters of this book. The three main aims of your roadmap must be to ensure that:

ü  you are vibrant what the scope and objectives of your change are and how it fits into the bigger picture of what your organization is trying to achieve strategically (business need);

ü  you have the ability to form productive relationships (relationships);

ü  You have created an environment that supports change (environment).

Structure of the roadmap

The roadmap takes account of the following points:

ü  expected timeframe for the change initiative;

ü  allocation of the available time to the iterations;

ü  description of the expected outcome for each iteration;

ü  Definition of the processes used in each iteration.

Applying the roadmap to your change

ü  Discover

ü  Plan

ü  Change

ü  Test

ü  Deploy

ü  Celebrate

Change management strategy

ü  Organization structure

ü  How risks and issues are escalated

ü  Balance with business as usual

ü  How quality of the work is checked

ü  How progress is to be tracked and reported

Change management plan

ü  Timeframe:

–     The high level timeframe allocated to this change, and indication that this has been decided in aggregation with the business.

–     How many iterations there are expected to be and what each of their expected outcomes are.

–     How the overall timeframe for the change will be distributed across these iterations.

ü  Use of the processes defined in the roadmap

–     Clarification on whether iterations will follow on consecutively from each other at the end of the process for realizing the benefits or soon after this process has commenced.

ü  Governance – allocation of specific activities needed to govern the change across each of the iterations. These activities will include regular progress reporting and reviews of risks and issues.

ü  Resources – what resources are required to identify, create, implement and quality review new ways of working and who will be responsible for collecting data about the new business environment to prove that benefits have been realized.

ü  Work streams – clarification of the areas of the business involved in the change (based on the scope and exclusions within the description of the change) and an explanation of how work in these areas is to be managed, eg grouped together into work streams.

ü  Assumptions – at this early stage it will be necessary to make some assumptions about how the change will evolve, and this will affect the number and duration of the iterations. These assumptions should be recorded and then these assumptions can be reviewed and updated at the end of each iteration.

ü  Constraints – there may also be some constraints that affect the iterations. For example, if there are times when the organization is particularly busy and changes are not allowed to take place, eg end of the financial year or during the heaviest trading periods, then these should be recorded as well so that these are taken into account now and at the end of iteration reviews.