CHANGE MANAGEMENT - M1 – S2 MIRNA ZAKI

Read “Blue Cloud Gets Agile, ” and prepare answers to the following questions

What was the trigger event that led Shel Skinner to adopt Agile?
A Trigger event is a shift in the environment that creates an urge of the organizational change. In this
case, the triggering event for change in the company was when the CEO, Shel Skinner, attended a
conference on a new methodology for software development called Agile. That conference was able to
touch him deeply, as later on Skinner mentioned that Agile had been doing and saying everything that
he had been thinking of for most of his career.

What is your evaluation of the change implementation steps followed by

Skinner?
As Skinner chose to implement the agile development methodology all of a sudden wit no consent of
the employees, the thing that brought less organizational change than what was expected. I believe that
if there had been more engagement to the employees prior to implementation and making them feel
empowered, there would have been definitely larger scale of organizational change adoption.

What behavioral changes, if any, does Agile require of employees?

Agile rapid change strategy in applying the organizational change created resistance at the employees
level pulling them back from contributing in the intended change. This environment forced by Agile
demands passive behavior of the employees asking them only to apply the new strategy.

How do you account for such widely varied responses to Agile among
Blue Cloud employees?
When Blue Cloud imposed the Agile strategy, the organizational change has been cascaded to the
employees, and they were even tightened with deadlines to show the adoption of the change. By nature
employees have varying personalities which ranges for demotivated to extremely motivated regarding
change. This why the results varied, whereas ideally employees should have been trained to the coming
change, in order to create the intended motivation and create the synergy that allow all employees
meet at the healthy motivational level to apply the change.

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 CHANGE MANAGEMENT - M1 – S2 MIRNA ZAKI

What should Skinner do now?

Skinner should have considered implementing the Sequential Model of Effective Change while
implementing Agile strategy which focus on three stages:

a. Unfreezing stage: In which the employees are added to the learning process for exploring the
change, this is the main stage which could have helped the employees at Blue Could before
getting forced to accept the organizational change.
b. Moving stage: in which the employees find out the strength and weakness in the individual and
teams, this could have empowered the employees to better cooperate and coordinate with each
other and meet collective success towards one orientation.
c. Refreezing stage: which also Skinner bypassed which is the stage in which employees go back to
normal operation with the intended change acquired explicitly, the thing that didn’t happen,
having the employees not learned about it. The education of the employees was also a crucial to
improve the organizational performance.

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