Shifting Left what matter!

About Change Management and Risk Management practices consciousness in daily work.

In the last 15+ years I've spent in the IT market, we've "shifted left" several things, starting with operations, then security, and now business value. This means people building products need to consider all these areas simultaneously. We evolved from introducing DevOps, then progressed to DevSecOps, and ultimately advanced to Value-Streams and Flow Engineering. Product development has become much more multifaceted as a result.

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What I want to show you in today's post is that we should now shift Change and Risk Management left. We need to equip all team members with basic knowledge of how to understand and manage change, and how to incorporate risk management practices into their change management approaches. Let's dive deeper and examine elements of these areas, exploring how today's product builders can effectively shift them left.

This exploration of "shifting left" Change and Risk Management will unfold in five chapters:

1. The Evolution of "Shifting Left" - We'll trace the journey from DevOps to DevSecOps to Value Streams, establishing why Change and Risk Management represents the next crucial frontier for product development teams.

2. Why Change Is Never Isolated - Through real-world examples like the banking platform migration disaster I experienced, we'll examine how seemingly isolated decisions create ripple effects across technical and business domains.

3. 🔐The Risk-Aware Toolkit - I'll share practical frameworks, assessment tools, and decision matrices that teams can implement immediately to evaluate change impact holistically.

4. 🔐Embedding Change Consciousness in Teams - You'll discover training approaches, team exercises, and meeting structures that build lasting change awareness within your organization.

5. 🔐From Reactive to Proactive: Building Organizational Resilience - We'll explore advanced strategies for anticipating change chains and transforming potential disruptions into competitive advantages.

Join me as we explore how equipping everyone with fundamental Change and Risk Management principles can prevent costly mistakes and accelerate your path to delivering value.

The Evolution of "Shifting Left"

I've watched the "shifting left" concept completely transform how we build products over the years. When DevOps first emerged, I remember how revolutionary it felt to break down those walls between development and operations teams, especially for siloed corporations. I always said that working in startups, I was DevOps before it was named like this. But back to the masses, I was working with a financial services client when they first adopted this approach, and the change was dramatic – teams that barely spoke to each other were suddenly collaborating daily. By bringing operations concerns earlier into the development lifecycle, we saw deployment times cut in half, while reliability actually improved. It wasn't just a technical shift; it required a complete rethinking of how teams worked together and shared responsibility.

Photo by Eugene Zhyvchik on Unsplash

Then the security breaches started making headlines, and we all realized we couldn't keep treating security as an afterthought. Have you noticed how quickly DevSecOps became the new standard? I certainly did. I worked with teams that began incorporating vulnerability scanning and threat modeling from day one of projects, rather than scrambling to address security issues right before release. The mindset shift was fascinating to watch – developers who once saw security as "someone else's problem" started taking ownership. Finally, they also don't need to speak with the Security department - maybe it was part of how quickly it clicked. The tools evolved too – automated security scanning became as fundamental as unit testing.

More recently, I've seen firsthand how the focus has shifted toward Value Streams and Flow Engineering. It's no longer enough to build technically excellent products; we need to understand the business value behind every line of code. I remember sitting in a planning meeting where a team was debating a complex technical implementation, when someone asked, "But how does this actually help our customers?" That simple question changed the entire conversation. They started validating business ideas, looking for any surveys etc, that will confirm our approach is valid, it was an amazing experience, like a startup in big corporation was created. According to Gartner, around 70% of organizations were using these practices by 2021 – which matches what I've observed in the field. Even it isn't mature, it's a hot topic - this is also one of my consulting bread and butter in this year. The most successful teams I've seen are those that can connect their technical decisions directly to business outcomes.

Now we're standing at what, I believe, is the next critical frontier: bringing Change and Risk Management principles into our everyday development work. But let me be clear – I'm not talking about adding bureaucratic processes or slowing down innovation. What I've learned from painful experience is that equipping teams with the right mindset and tools to anticipate ripple effects can prevent major disasters down the road.

Have you ever been part of a seemingly small change that unexpectedly broke something critical? I certainly have, and those experiences taught me the value of thoughtful risk assessment. The good news is that modern Change and Risk Management practices can leverage automation and data analytics without creating friction, It can be simple like Business Model Canvas. I've seen teams use these capabilities to map dependencies, predict potential failure points, and implement appropriate safeguards – all while maintaining their agility.

What's exciting to me about this evolution is that it represents a natural next step in our journey toward more resilient, secure, and valuable software delivery. And in the coming sections, I'll share specific approaches I've seen work in real organizations just like yours.

Why Change Is Never Isolated

Let me share a story that still makes me shake my head when I recall it. A few years ago, I was consulting for a telecommunications company during a legacy system replacement project. The development team had meticulously planned a database migration that seemed straightforward on paper. We had run through all the standard checks and balances, and everyone was confident in the approach.

Photo by Brad Starkey on Unsplash

The night of the migration, we initiated the database switchover according to plan. Within minutes, alarm bells started ringing—literally. The company's entire TV service went completely dark. Thousands of customers lost their signal simultaneously, and the monitoring dashboards lit up like a Christmas tree.

What we discovered was shocking: multiple teams across the organization had been accessing our database without our knowledge, all of them even using our credentials. These shadow dependencies weren't documented anywhere, weren't part of any architectural diagrams, and certainly weren't factored into our migration plan. We had to roll back immediately, but the damage was done—both to customer experience and to the project timeline.

This is the reality I've observed repeatedly throughout my career: in today's interconnected systems, there's no such thing as an isolated change. Every modification, no matter how small, creates ripples that propagate through technical systems and business processes alike. Error like this can cost millions in emergency fixes, customer compensation, and reputational damage – all from a change that took less than an hour to implement.

I've seen this pattern repeat across industries. A retail client modified their inventory management system, only to discover it broke their returns process during peak holiday season. A healthcare provider updated their authentication service and accidentally locked out remote medical staff from accessing patient records. These weren't failures of technical competence – they were failures to understand the complex web of dependencies surrounding each change.

What's particularly challenging is that these dependencies aren't just technical. They span business processes, user expectations, regulatory requirements, and more.

This interconnectedness is why traditional Change Management approaches often fall short. They typically focus on managing the mechanics of the change itself, rather than mapping the ecosystem it affects. And they're usually treated as a separate process handled by specialized teams, rather than a mindset embedded in everyone's work.

The key insight I've gained is that effective Change Management isn't about controlling change – it's about understanding dependencies and plan for the effects change can bring to them.

This is where Risk Management becomes essential. In my experience, the most effective teams approach change with a risk-aware mindset that asks: "What could go wrong, and how would we handle it?" They systematically identify potential failure points, assess their likelihood and impact, and implement appropriate mitigations.