In today’s business landscape, the ability to adapt, respond, renew and innovate is paramount. Agility is more than a buzzword and the concept of agility extends far beyond the realm of software development. It’s a mindset that can breathe new life into different facets of your organisation. In this article, we will explore how agility can be harnessed at levels within an organisation, ranging from the strategic top down to the everyday magic of operations.
1 – Business Agility
At the highest level, business agility enables an organisation to sustain healthy results in a ‘VUCA’ (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex & Ambiguous) world.
Agility at this level allows us to deal with questions such as:
- How do we set up an organisational structure that focuses on customer needs, creates flow and has the capacity to sense and respond to market changes swiftly?
- How do we manage the ‘key person risk’ so that the unavailability of specific individual (or small group) for a longer period of time does not completely derail the business.?
- How do I cultivate a learning organisation so that it thrives on curiosity, embraces continuous improvement, and collectively evolves with the ever-changing landscape of knowledge and innovation?
- How do we create governance structures that allows for optimal decision making, fast approvals & employee engagement?
- How do we foster a culture of innovation, respect, adaptability, & resilience?
- How do we embed agility in our strategy to respond with more ease & grace to unexpected events? For instance, consider the rapid adaptability required during unforeseen challenges like the global pandemic (e.g., Covid-19) or the emergence of transformative technologies (e.g., ChatGPT).
2 – Business Development
The goal of business development is to create and implement growth opportunities by launching new products, penetrating new market segments, creating new business models, among other things. Business development deals with uncertainty at various levels: customer needs, delivery channels, pricing, technology, marketing, … The Lean Startup methodology is a common (agile) approach to test & evolve business ideas. This agile methodology enables entrepreneurs (and intrapreneurs) to
- Facilitate the process of finding product-market fit.
- Accelerate learning through encouraging a rapid and iterative process of learning from real-world customer feedback and market experiences.
- Expedite the time it takes to bring a product or service to market by avoiding unnecessary features and focusing on delivering a minimum viable product (MVP) quickly.
- Reduce the amount of time, money, and resources wasted on developing products or services that may not meet market needs or have unproven assumptions.
3 – Program & change management
Any organisation is confronted with the need to make significant changes in the organisation from time to time. Typically programs focus on organisational structure to deal with growth for example, on employee engagement or on performance (whether that is safety, quality, cost or delivery).
Agility sheds a different light on such programs:
- How could such large-scale programs be planned & managed more effectively?
- What choices do we have to implement such important changes? Is it better to do a big bang initiative or divide it in several smaller parts?
- How can we promote input & collaboration from all levels of the organisation before & during change initiatives?
- How does running multiple initiatives in parallel impact our organisation and the success rate of each individual initiative?
- How do we avoid fatigue among employees for yet-another-management-fad?
4 – Product development
For this blog, we define a product as a good or service offered to a customer. Product development encompasses any effort to enhance or modify a product. Any such modification affects customers & stakeholders and carries risk due to uncertainties. This is the domain where ‘Agile‘ is best known for, with Scrum being the most popular framework for product development in IT..
- How can we structure our development teams for optimal efficiency?
- How can several teams work better together?
- How can we accelerate the lead time of innovations?
- How can we get faster feedback from customers so that optimal value can be delivered?
- How can teams continuously improve their work and outcomes?
- How can we increase capability of more junior employees so not all the burden comes to the senior employees?
- How can we deal smarter with risks & uncertainty?
5 – Agile Mindset
Many employees will not be involved in the activities above. Their core activities related to ‘operations’: They are producing & selling the current products & services in the portfolio. Or they are executing running the agreed processes such as payroll, reporting, etc. Although this is not the core domain of Agile (more the area of Lean & Six Sigma), there is still a lot to learn and apply from the agile methodologies, such as
- How can we test assumptions and ideas prior to making a change to the process?
- How can we create a culture that embraces change? A culture that sees changes as normal and beneficial to all, without disrupting how people work too frequently?
- What steps can be taken to foster innovation at all levels?
- In what ways can we encourage a mindset of continuous learning and collaboration?
- How can we empower employees more?
- How can we increase trust, psychological safety & transparency?
- How can we align goals throughout the organisation?
Learn more?
There are various options to get more info on these topics:
- You might want to check the book reviews to see whether there are particular books that provide more in depth knowledge (or drop a message to get a personal suggestion).
- You might check for training such as ‘Agility for executives‘ or ‘Agility outside IT development‘.
- Or you might book a 1-hour Ask-me-anything session.