2025 Agile Practitioner of the Year
Agile Practitioner of the Year
This award spotlights professionals who champion Agile values and adaptive delivery, demonstrating a collaborative, iterative, and value-focused Agile mindset.
Lillya Lozanova, United Bulgarian Bank
Winner
When Plans Meet Reality: Leading Change in Complex Environments
Lessons on adaptation, trust, and building resilient teams in evolving organizations
I’m Lillya Lozanova, an Agile Coach with over 20 years of experience guiding teams and organizations across industries including banking, insurance, retail, hospitality, telecommunications, and digital services. My journey has taken me from structured project and program management roles into coaching and leading large-scale organizational change. Today, I work with complex organizations evolving toward more adaptive, collaborative ways of working, helping teams and leaders navigate change while delivering real value.
Agile Without the Theater: What I’ve Learned by Letting Go
When people ask me what “agile” means, I don’t talk about frameworks, roles, or ceremonies. Agile is the ability to treat change as a normal, everyday condition, not as a disruption. It is about continuously adapting as our environment, priorities, and challenges evolve.
In practice, agile means learning how to adjust direction and collaboration without losing focus or ownership. Over time, it stops being something teams “do” and becomes the way they work. This understanding did not come from theory, it came from practice, and from being wrong.
At the beginning of my journey, I genuinely believed that agile ways of working were obviously better, and that people would naturally embrace them the way I did. I assumed everyone was equally motivated to improve continuously, not only within their narrow expertise, but across collaboration, ownership, and mindset. Reality quickly challenged that belief.
Many professionals are used to following detailed processes and predefined solutions. Opinions are not always expected, let alone encouraged. Expecting people to suddenly embrace autonomy, experimentation, and shared responsibility simply because we renamed the process was naive. Agile did not fail in those situations. My assumptions did.
That realization reshaped the way I approach change and resistance. Resistance is not the problem, it is the natural reaction. We don’t wake up thinking, “What should I change in my life today?” We wake up and follow routines we chose for a reason. Agile transformations challenge those routines by suggesting there might be better ways to work, especially when our environment has already changed.
Over time, I’ve developed a few principles I follow:
First: I stopped talking about agile. The word itself carries baggage, previous experiences, failed transformations, and conflicting interpretations. When I remove the terminology and talk instead about real problems, real frustrations, and real outcomes, conversations change immediately.
Second: I never try to convince a whole group at once. Groups make it easy to wait, hide, and avoid responsibility. Change happens individually. Each person has different fears, motivations, and triggers. That’s where real transformation starts.
Third, and most important: I never force improvements people and organizations don’t want. Agile is not a “modern” trend. It exists to solve problems. If I come in telling people what their problems are, resistance is guaranteed. If I ask what they want to improve and support them there, trust begins to form.
This mindset also changed my relationship with agile practices themselves. As an example, I no longer insist on 15-minute daily meetings as a rule. Context matters. Teams, companies, and cultures are different. What matters is that the team meets daily, communicates openly, and stays aligned, not whether a timer goes off at minute fifteen.
I also learned not to introduce everything at once. Some teams simply cannot absorb that much change. Timing is critical. The right practice at the right moment creates momentum; the wrong one creates fatigue.
Failed agile is easy to spot. It looks like old processes with new labels. Agile terminology is used confidently, values are quoted out loud, but behavior remains unchanged. When I recognize this early, I stop the theater. I bring the focus back to decision-making, trust, transparency, and accountability, because without those, no framework will help.
One belief I hold strongly is the power of face-to-face communication. I have yet to see a case where people met in person, spoke honestly about their challenges, and did not make progress. The more digital our world becomes, the easier it is to misunderstand each other, and the harder it becomes to solve real problems without human connection.
When teams are trusted by management, when there is respect between people, and when they continuously look for ways to improve their daily work without being told to, that’s when I smile and tell them: you’re already there.
Agile has done its job the moment it no longer needs a name.
For those of you rooted in traditional project management, embracing agility does not mean abandoning your discipline, it means amplifying it. The same focus on planning, risk management, and accountability remains critical; what changes is how we respond when plans shift, priorities evolve, or new information emerges. Leading change in complex environments means combining the rigor of project management with the flexibility to adapt, and the courage to trust teams to find the best path forward.
When we embrace this mindset, we don’t just deliver projects on time, we also create resilient teams, foster collaboration across silos, and build organizations that can thrive in uncertainty. Agile, at its heart, is not a method, it’s a leadership approach. And leaders who understand that can inspire real, lasting change.
