Bringing People With You: The People Side of Agile Change

An agile transformation asks people to change far more than their meeting schedule. Specialists are asked to work in cross-functional teams. Managers who assigned work are asked to stop. Individual high performers are asked to care about team results. Unless leaders plan for that, the formal changes happen on paper while the old habits carry on underneath.

General change-management models apply to agile change as they do to any other, and this guide does not re-teach them. Instead, it covers what is specific to agile transformations: using volunteers, spreading practice through communities rather than central experts, fixing incentives, giving managers a real new role, and letting teams own their own improvement goals.

The guidance comes from the official sources leaders can check for themselves: the Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) adoption principles, DORA's guide to transforming organizations, and the U.S. Government Accountability Office's Agile Assessment Guide (GAO-24-105506).

Start with volunteers, after education

LeSS names "use volunteering" as one of its three adoption principles, calling true volunteering "a powerful way of engaging peoples’ minds and hearts." It suggests the approach is underused, probably because managers feel a loss of control, while for people in teams it feels empowering.

The order matters. LeSS says volunteering starts with education: people need enough education and discussion to understand what they are volunteering for. Its examples include volunteering for the initial product, for the initial teams and for team formation.

For a hypothetical example, imagine a claims department adopting agile. Rather than assigning staff to new teams, leaders run a series of open sessions explaining the new team structure, then invite people to choose which team to join within agreed constraints, such as each team needing certain skills.

The Agile Manifesto's principles set the tone for this approach: "Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done."

Combine top-down support with bottom-up energy

LeSS treats "top-down or bottom-up?" as a false dichotomy and recommends both. Purely top-down adoption, it says, causes resistance. Purely bottom-up adoption creates a burst of energy that fades when enthusiastic people hit organizational walls without top-level support to change structures and policies. "The managers’ frame of mind must be support, not control."

GAO's guide is more flexible on this point, noting that either a top-down or bottom-up approach can succeed in scaling agile. It suggests two ways to ease a reorganization: empowering communities of practice or working groups of motivated or influential individuals to lead the change, and using small pilot programs to learn where the organization's deficiencies are before scaling.

The common ground is that people with authority must actively remove structural barriers, while people doing the work must have real room to shape the change.

Spread practice through communities, not just experts

How new practices spread matters as much as which practices you choose. DORA's guide cites analysis from the 2019 State of DevOps Report showing that high performers favored strategies that create community structures at both low and high levels of the organization. The top two strategies were communities of practice and grassroots efforts, followed by proofs of concept used as a template or a seed for other teams.

Low performers, by contrast, tended to favor training centers and centers of excellence. DORA explains why centralized expertise struggles: a center of excellence becomes a bottleneck that cannot scale with demand, creates an exclusive group of "experts," and separates the experts from doing the real work. Training centers can succeed, DORA says, but they require dedicated resources to sustain learning once teams return to their regular environment, or new habits stay in the center.

In practice, that means funding the time people spend in communities of practice, recognizing the practitioners who lead them, and treating early teams' working methods as templates others can adapt.

Align incentives and rewards with team results

Incentives are one of the quietest ways a transformation can fail. GAO's guide includes, as a best practice, that incentives and rewards are aligned to agile development methods. It says organizations should examine whether existing incentive and reward systems interfere with or reinforce agile behavior, and change them where needed.

GAO makes several specific points:

• Changes to incentive systems may be slow and ineffective without active involvement from human resources and employee unions, so involve those groups early.
• Rewards should be tied to accomplishments, such as working software, not to the outputs of an agile process.
• Most organizations reward individual accomplishments; agile organizations should supplement those with rewards for team success.
• Other forms of recognition, such as presenting a program's success story at conferences or offering team access to certificate programs, can supplement individual rewards.

Give managers a real new role

Middle managers often have the most to lose in an agile transformation, and the least clarity about what comes next. GAO notes that a large-scale move to agile can involve realigning traditional roles with agile roles, such as program manager to product owner, and that organizations will face challenges as they train and "untrain" staff in new roles.

LeSS offers a concrete alternative to simply removing authority. Its guidance on the role of the manager describes middle managers as capability builders who see the whole, help teams and Scrum Masters remove obstacles, teach problem solving and go see what is really happening where the work is done. LeSS also expects all managers in a product group to start with self-education about the framework.

The LeSS rules include managers in the Overall Retrospective, held after team retrospectives to discuss cross-team and system-wide issues. That gives managers a defined, valuable place in the improvement cycle.

Let teams own their improvement goals

People commit to goals they help set. DORA's guide says a team's own target conditions or objectives must be set by the team; if they are set top-down, teams will not have a stake in the outcome and might "game" them instead. It also says teams need the autonomy, capacity, resources and leadership support to do improvement work, and should not let normal delivery work crowd it out.

DORA notes that it is common, when starting cultural transformation, for teams not to achieve any of their specified goals. Its advice in that case is to set a single goal for the next iteration and dedicate everything to achieving it. Leaders who treat early misses as learning, rather than failure, make it safer for teams to keep trying.

Key takeaways

• LeSS recommends volunteering, preceded by enough education that people understand what they are choosing.
• Combine visible leadership support for structural change with room for bottom-up energy; LeSS warns either approach alone is likely to fail.
• DORA's analysis found high performers favored communities of practice and grassroots efforts, while low performers leaned on centers of excellence and training centers.
• GAO advises aligning incentives with team results and working software, with HR and unions involved early.
• Give managers a defined new role as capability builders, and let teams set their own improvement targets.

Sources

• The LeSS Company, Three Principles (Adopting LeSS)
• The LeSS Company, Role of Manager
• The LeSS Company, LeSS Rules
• DORA, How to transform your organization (last updated October 6, 2025)
• U.S. Government Accountability Office, GAO Agile Assessment Guide: Best Practices for Adoption and Implementation, GAO-24-105506 (November 28, 2023; reissued with revisions December 15, 2023)
• Agile Manifesto authors, Principles behind the Agile Manifesto (2001)