Agile Business Change Blog Thoughts on Agile Strategic Business Change and Agile Delivery

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So we all agree that projects should expect a significant amount of change. Agile projects are geared to deal with change in an inexpensive way. That’s all great but there still needs to be a mechanism in play to pay for the change, inexpensive or not. That’s simple you say, that’s just contingency. Well it is, but if we use the word contingency then to some ears we are saying ‘just in case money’. But we have already agreed that change is inevitable, so it’s certainly not just in case, it’s going to be needed.

I am not going to look for now at the types of ‘contingency’ we can establish. I want to talk about the more basic concept of what we call this and how we present it to key people, especially stakeholders with the cheque book who have to be convinced that these funds are important.

So, the ‘reserve’ is needed to deal with change. Change adapts the project in one way or another and the amount of reserve we have is our capacity to accept change. So the phrase I am using at the moment is ‘Adaptive Capacity’. By not calling it contingency, people have, in my experience, tried to understand the concept more than when I have just said ‘let’s have some contingency’.

OK, so the name seems to work, but it’s also a good idea to have some supporting information available when people ask what it’s for exactly. I have split change into three separate causes,

• Discovery – ‘Oh hell…we forgot about that bit!’
• Innovation – ‘…but it would be even better if it could do this as well!’
• Uncertainty – ‘Ok, now we understand how it will work and it’s going to take a little more time than we originally thought’

When it’s described in these three terms people seem to understand that it’s inevitable, important and not ‘just in case money’. It’s the ability for the project to absorb change.

I have used the term ‘I’ here quite a bit, but I must recognise that my colleague Mike Robinson of IndigoBlue made a significant contribution to this and deserves some creative credit.

Now how do we support the Adaptive Capacity and what governance is needed? That’s for next time.