There are plenty of posts and articles that explain the facts of how the change from waterfall to agile has to happen in order to be a success. One thing we all know is that the change of mindset is one of the hardest to overcome within the agile transformation. This is not going to be another post writing about what everyone knows anyway. Instead, I would like to focus more on the psychological aspects. I experienced this to be a key factor to be sensitive about, when you move away from waterfall project management towards agile methods.

The agile transformation is tough on people who are used to projects managed as waterfall. The longer (not talking about weeks or month but years or even decades) they had worked in waterfall, the further they are away from an mindset that is necessary for agile methods such as SCRUM.

I would like to share my insights with you on what I found to be one of the crucial aspects for the agile transformation. But before we get to that, let me give you a brief introduction of the psychological side of waterfall project management.

Waterfall Feelings

For a better understanding, let us think of a bigger project with an implementation phase of more then a year, not just a feature or a simple change request. To simplify the explanation of psychological aspects, we will only look at a project as a super simple example of the agile transformation.
In waterfall one is most likely to think the whole concept through all the way to the end before starting the implementation. This caters up to a need of completeness to avoid loose ends and the feeling of losing control. Although waterfall is a highly time consuming and costly way, the feeling of ‘having thought of everything’ in the beginning provides a feeling of safety that might justify the time and costs. A waterfall project manager might think they know everything about their project, they also have a plan with milestones and they feel like they are ready to start as everything is known and uncertainty is reduced to a minimum. Safety thinking has a huge impact on a lot of people and how they prefer to manage their projects.
Please allow me to spoil you at this point, although I am sure you already thought the same: It is a false sense of safety!
As one thinks they have their complete concept which just needs to be implemented, they start to stumble over things they forgot to think of in the beginning and might as well find a way higher as anticipated complexity when developing the software. Thoughts that might pop up are somewhat like: Oh gee, there is still so much of what we haven’t thought of and yet we cannot change the concept as it took us forever to finish it and changing it again does not work with the tight schedule we are on.
You hear the exhaustion, don’t you?

A lot of waterfall projects I have seen over the years, always seem to have a catastrophic or at least a very chaotic taste. With a highly positive correlation of project size and catastrophe. What happens then is, that people tend to say the project was hell because no one could foresee the high complexity. It sure was highly complex, no one would doubt that. But what made it feel like hell, was usually the way the project was managed and not the complexity itself.

The Dynamic of Feelings of Safety and Uncertainty during the Agile Change

What you see in our waterfall example is a feeling of safety in the beginning and stumbling into uncertainty along the way. Going agile is the other way around. Working agile for the first time, there is a lot of uncertainty in the beginning. But as the project moves forward the team gains more and more safety along the way as they learn a lot about the product and the product feature they are working on are manageable. The more they learn about their product while implementing, the faster is the future story writing (stories are a kind of concept). So in agile with an increasing learning curve of the whole team, the overall time invested in conception decreases and so does the overall time of implementation. Put in other words, everything is faster with less failure. This means uncertainty is shrinking over time when working agile.

To those used to the waterfall and strict rules, agile feels like losing ground under their feet. Therefore, understanding the safety and uncertainty feelings in the context of waterfall and agile methods and how they need to change during the agile transformation is crucial, when you do want to be successful without leaving people behind.
People are afraid to fail and not thinking everything through in the beginning is somehow considered as provoking failure in the minds of waterfall-people. Be sensitive about these thinking patterns and please do not ignore the dynamic of uncertainty and safety as it can easily backfire and makes the transformation unnecessarily harder.

An agile transformation requires a TRANSFORMATION OF MINDSET!