4.2 Agile Practices and Agile Change Practices

APMG Change Management Foundation Exam

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1 Chapter 1: The v3 Foundation Exam and the Organisational Context

1.1 Exam Structure, the Five Syllabus Areas and the Certification Path 1.2 Scene Setting: External and Internal Factors Shaping Change 1.3 Change Management, Benefits and Dis-benefits

2 Chapter 2: Understanding the Change Context

2.1 Kelman's Three Levels of Adoption 2.2 VUCA and the Cynefin Framework 2.3 Planned Change versus Emergent Change 2.4 Systems Thinking in Change 2.5 Organisational Culture and Its Three Levels

3 Chapter 3: Diagnosing and Structuring the Change Approach

3.1 Lewin's Force Field Analysis 3.2 Co-Design 3.3 The ADKAR Model 3.4 Evolving the n-Step Process and Kotter's Eight Accelerators

4 Chapter 4: Delivery Strategy, Agile Practices and the Change Strategy

4.1 Delivery Strategy: Big Bang, Phased, Voluntary and Iterative 4.2 Agile Practices and Agile Change Practices 4.3 The Continuous Change Management Cycle 4.4 The Change Strategy

5 Chapter 5: People and Change — Individual Difference and Response

5.1 Differences in People and Personality Preferences 5.2 Neuroscience and Change: SCARF, Mindset and Insight 5.3 The Change Curve 5.4 Bridges' Transition Model

6 Chapter 6: Motivation, Resilience and Learning

6.1 Rewards, Punishment and Pink's Three Motivators 6.2 Positive Psychology, Resilience and Appreciative Inquiry 6.3 The Beckhard-Harris Change Formula and Schein's Two Anxieties 6.4 Competence, Learning and the Learning Dip 6.5 Learning Preferences: Kolb, Honey and Mumford

7 Chapter 7: Key Roles in Change Leadership

7.1 Key Roles in the Change Process 7.2 The Role of the Change Sponsor 7.3 The Change Agent's Role and Personal Influence 7.4 The Role of Local Leadership in Change

8 Chapter 8: Psychological Safety, Leadership and Culture

8.1 Psychological Climate and Psychological Safety 8.2 Carolyn Taylor: How Leadership Shapes Culture 8.3 Leadership Styles and Organisational Climate

9 Chapter 9: Teams and Change

9.1 Team Structures and Change Agent Networks 9.2 Tuckman's Stages of Team Development 9.3 Lencioni: Assessing and Growing Team Effectiveness 9.4 Harvesting the Value of Team Diversity

10 Chapter 10: Stakeholder Identification, Analysis and Engagement

10.1 Stakeholder Definition and Identification 10.2 Stakeholder Analysis, Segmentation and Empathy Mapping 10.3 Stakeholder Mapping and Sources of Power 10.4 Barriers to Engagement 10.5 Planning Stakeholder Engagement

11 Chapter 11: Communication Theory, Messaging and Emotional Connection

11.1 Communication Theory and the Communication Process 11.2 Barriers to Communication and Cognitive Biases 11.3 Messaging: Setting Context and the Tell, Sell, Include Approach 11.4 Appealing to Hearts and Minds

12 Chapter 12: Communication Channels and Planning

12.1 Ways of Communicating and VARK Language Style Preferences 12.2 Communication Channels: One-Way, Two-Way, Lean and Rich 12.3 Communications Planning

13 Chapter 13: Assessing Change Impact and Severity

13.1 Change Management as Risk Management and the Two-Step Assessment 13.2 Step 1: Categorising Impacts and Identifying Impact Areas 13.3 Step 1 Continued: Gap Analysis, Impact Profiles and Monitoring 13.4 Step 2: Change Impact Severity

14 Chapter 14: Resistance to Change

14.1 Causes of Resistance and Oreg's Four Neural Factors 14.2 Common Reasons for Resistance and How to Deal With Them 14.3 Building a Strategy to Manage Resistance

15 Chapter 15: Change Analytics and Exam Readiness

15.1 Measurement Types and the Change Delivery Scorecard 15.2 Building a Change Analytics Strategy 15.3 Exam Technique and Final Revision

4.2 Agile Practices and Agile Change Practices

Key Takeaways Explain This Topic AI

Agile emphasises collaboration, pushing tactical decisions down the hierarchy, frequent releases, expecting change, and inspecting and adapting work

Common agile concepts include frequent delivery, self-organised teams, empowerment, close customer relationships, minimum viable product, MoSCoW prioritisation, fixed time, sprints and full transparency

MoSCoW stands for must have, should have, could have, and won't have for now

Effective change managers assess context, avoid applying a single model rigidly, watch change analytics, adapt as situations evolve and stay resilient

Agile change practices include minimum viable change practice, visual management, stand-ups, retrospectives, a change backlog and sprints

Last updated: September 2026

The syllabus treats agile in two places: agile practices , meaning the delivery approach change managers work alongside, and agile change practices , meaning how the change manager's own work adapts. Both are examinable.

What agile is

Often the real-world implementation strategy is a hybrid of two or more of the basic delivery approaches. Agile approaches are characterised by:

Collaboration and good communication
Pushing tactical decisions down the hierarchy as far as possible
Frequent releases
The expectation of change
The need to inspect and adapt work

That third and fourth pairing is what distinguishes agile from simply working faster. Agile assumes the requirement will change and builds inspection points to catch it, rather than treating change as a failure of planning.

Common agile concepts, behaviours and techniques

CM3 lists these together, and recall questions draw from the list:

Concept What it means
Frequent delivery Value delivered regularly rather than in one release
Incremental solutions and iteration Delivering in increments and iterating towards the final solution
Self-organised teams Teams decide how to do the work
Empowerment Authority sits with those doing the work
Close relationship to the customer Continuous contact rather than periodic sign-off
Accepting that not everything must be delivered Scope flexes; not every requirement survives
Minimum viable product The smallest useful deliverable
Prioritising Deciding what matters most, continuously
Fixed time Time is fixed; scope flexes
Sprints Fixed-length timeboxes of work
Full transparency Progress and problems are visible to all
MoSCoW

MoSCoW is the prioritisation technique named in the syllabus:

M — Must have
S — Should have
C — Could have
W — Won't have for now

The W is the one candidates get wrong. It is won't have for now — a deliberate, time-bounded deferral, not "would like" and not permanent exclusion.

The effective change manager and agile change practices

CM3 lists five behaviours effective change managers should show. These are among the most quotable lines in the syllabus:

Assess context and apply a mix of change practices as appropriate
Avoid taking a single framework or model and applying it persistently or rigidly
Continuously watch for insights from change analytics and process feedback

Adapt their approaches as the situation evolves , keeping sponsors, leaders and others involved in the change effort fully briefed

Remain resilient, flexible and willing to learn

Using agile techniques in a change management context greatly helps with adaptability.

Three capabilities

Drawing on Frahm and Ross's The Agile Change Playbook , CM3 identifies three capabilities:

Data-informed decision making
Continuous engagement
Visual and transparent communication
Four core practices

And four core practices:

Working out loud — making your work visible as you do it, rather than reporting on it afterwards
Change data analysis
Visual management
The Kanban board
Agile change techniques

The specific techniques CM3 names for change managers:

Minimum Viable Change Practice (MVCP)
Visual management tools
Stand-ups — short, frequent team check-ins
Retrospectives — structured reflection on what is working and what is not
Change backlog — a prioritised list of change activities, reordered as priorities shift
Sprints — timeboxed change work aligned to delivery cadence
Minimum viable change practice

MVCP deserves particular attention because the exam quotes its definition. Minimum viable change practice is "the least effort change intervention that you could make and still accomplish your goals" .

Note the wording precisely: least effort , not "minimum work" and not "maximum effort". The principle is proportionality. Where a release is genuinely low-impact, a two-line note in a team channel may be the whole change intervention. Reserving the heavy machinery — training, engagement workshops, impact assessment — for the releases that need it is what makes change management sustainable alongside a fortnightly release cadence.

MVCP connects directly to the delivery-strategy warning that five minutes' work for a software developer could produce a major process rewrite. Applying minimum viable change well requires accurate impact judgement, not simply doing less.

Working out loud

Of the four core practices, working out loud is the one that most changes a change manager's daily habits. It means making your work visible as you do it rather than reporting on it afterwards — an open change backlog, a visible impact assessment in progress, a decision log people can read while the decision is still open.

The benefit is not transparency for its own sake. Work that is visible while it is being done attracts correction while correction is still cheap. A stakeholder who sees an impact assessment mid-draft can say "you have missed the night shift" before the assessment is published, briefed and acted on.

The discomfort is real: visible work invites challenge, and change managers are as prone as anyone to preferring to present finished things. That is precisely why it pairs with visual management and the Kanban board in CM3's list — both make the state of the work legible to people outside the change team without anyone having to ask.

Retrospectives complete the set. A change team that runs delivery sprints but never inspects its own way of working is applying agile mechanics without the inspect-and-adapt behaviour that makes them useful.