Change is difficult, stressful and rewarding when you are open to it.  Personally, I love change, in moderation. 

When I coach teams, I ask them what they want to get out of the experience, and where they want to be in 6 months.  A common response is "we want to be better than we are today.  Things should just work - this agile stuff can't be that hard".  If you have ever gone through change, you know this is not true. 

Change is hard depending on the attitude of the individual taking on the change.  If it is not approached with an open mind and some clear goals to measure how/when you have arrived at the desired state, chances are you'll flop around like a fish out of water, never knowing if your next gasp will be your last.

Think about a paper matchbook.  The goal is to have your matchbook cover stay halfway open.  When you bend it back halfway, it flips back to a position close to it's original closed position.  Why?  Because there was not enough applied force to make it stay open where you really wanted it to, in the middle.

Apply this idea to teams going through change.  Since I'm a little intense in a lot of the things I do, I solicited guys to join our team with the caveat that we would be going full-bore, taking our virtual matchbook cover and folding it almost backwards in order for the techniques we experimented with to stick, and so we could make the best decision possible in keeping, dropping and recommending techniques to others.

We all start out with a closed matchbook.  We wanted to get to a desired state, which we define and map out so we know when we get there - this is our target state. 

When our team started out, we thought we knew what our target was.  We thought we reached our target just before heading off to the Agile 2005 conference.  Boy were we wrong.  After a day at the conference, we realized how much more we had to push ourselves to reach our target.

When going through change, set your sights beyond the desired target.  Doing so will allow you to reach it with the level of knowledge that is required to know the target has been reached. 

The additional stress, pressure and knowledge experienced while pushing beyond your comfort zone, beyond your target, allows you to sit back in the end and quantifiably say "this worked, this didn't.  As a result, we will tweak our process here by a bit and re-evaluate in a month."  This is our fully maxed out matchbook.

Once you have fully maxed yourself out, you can settle back at your desired state (see attachment book-max.gif) and be more productive than you have ever been.  No one said this would be easy.  Have the courage to see it through for at least 3 months.  You'll be a better person for it. 

Let me know how it goes.