Business agility is measured by the how quickly and effectively your business can respond to an opportunity or threat, including: commercial, legal, technical, social, moral, or political. A highly agile business responds faster than their competitors, providing them a competitive advantage. How do you increase your organization’s ability to respond faster and more effectively?
An agile business needs
- Agile People
- Agile Business Process
- Agile Tools
Agile People
The effectiveness of any organization is measured by the effectiveness of the people in that organization. If you want to improve your organizations agility, then you must develop agile people who think and work with agility.
Agile companies need agile marketing teams. Your marketing department needs to be able to quickly market new products and services. Marketing needs to respond quickly to changing market conditions by identifying opportunities or threats and then communicating those opportunities or threats to the right teams.
The Chief Operating Officer and all those responsible for the operations of your business must be agile thinkers. An agile business must operate with agility. The operations of a business are closely tied to process, so the next section will focus on agile business process.
Additionally, your business administration or back-office workers must be agile. HR needs to hire new people with new skills, change job descriptions, re-organize departments, and provide new training to meet changing conditions. Your accountants need to revise budgets and develop new financial forecasts quickly. New products and services may require changes to revenue streams, cost centers, charts of accounts, and various reports. Your business may need new financing and bank accounts. IT departments need to quickly develop or find new technology to support the changing business requirements.
Agile Salespeople learn how to sell new products and services quickly and effectively. They find new customers, create new sales literature and sales funnels. They listen to customers and identify new opportunities and threats.
In an agile business, all your teams and departments must change quickly and work together effectively. This requires an agile leadership team that is organizing the people, quickly removing new roadblocks, assessing new risks, providing new direction, while adjusting the vision and mission of the organize to stay relevant.
Agile business process
Your people cannot move fast and efficiently if they are weighed down by heavy process. Red tape and bureaucracy slow down business operations creating roadblocks for agile innovation. Operating procedures need to support fast moving agile teams, which often requires greater autonomy and accountability.
Changing your business process can break automations and disrupt efficiencies gained from predictable constants. As you move from a traditional business model to a more agile model, you will experience growing pains and things will break. But every time something breaks it creates an opportunity to learn and improve.
Creating a learning culture for your organization is essential for business agility. One of the seven competencies for Business Agility in Lean Enterprises identified by the Scaled Agile Framework is a Continuous Learning Culture. Innovation and success are the result of learning from mistakes. Micky Rooney once said, “You always pass failure on your way to success.”
Long and monolithic procedures must be broken down into components, which are shorter in duration and modular. Composable procedures and products allows you to quickly build new products and procedures leveraging existing components that work well in your environment. Trying to build new products and procedures from scratch requires a lot of time and they may not work well with existing products or procedures. Composability is key to agility.
Agile Tools
As agile employees move faster and develop new products and services using new business procedures, they need tools to support them and help them work efficiently. You don’t want to slow them down by making them use tools that are not appropriate for their work. If you were coaching an agile gymnast, you would want her to wear flexible clothes that don’t get in the way of her movement. If you made your gymnast wear a suit of armor, it will reduce her flexibility and speed.
Manufactures may need new conveyor belts and modular machines to promote composable production. Warehouses may need different shelves and bins to store new items. Retail stores may need new display cases or to make changes to floor plans to lead customers to your new products. The right agile tools improve the efficiency of your employees and customers.
New data about your new products combined with new customer data, new vendor data, and new business operations will likely drive new information technologies to automate and drive business decisions. As you quickly build new products for your business, you may need new computer systems, new reports, additional hardware, or devices. Customers may need new tools like mobile applications and websites to access your new products and services.
The Problem
The problem with all these new people, procedures, products, services, and tools is that it can take a lot of time to implement using traditional business methods. But there is good news! You can solve this problem using lean and agile methods to transform your business faster. And an Agile Master can guide your business through this process using their expertise.
First, an Agile Master will help you eliminate waste in your organization, which can save you time and money. Most agile companies adopt lean management principles to help …
- Deliver value to your customer
- Eliminate waste
- Drive continuous improvement
Second, agile organizations master the art of reusing and borrowing ideas. For example, new cars are introduced every year, but they don’t start from nothing. Quite often they use standard wheels, radios from other manufactures, reuse existing frames, borrow design ideas from what is trending favorably with customers. They may look radically different, but they are often highly modular with many reusable components.
Composable Architecture
Composable Architecture is a system of thinking that breaks your solution into multiple components that can be swapped in and out or combined to create new solutions. A composable system is self-contained and capable of operating independently or in combination with other technologies. A common analogy is LEGO building blocks. They can easily be combined with other blocks to build a variety of solutions.
Composable Thinking
Business agility requires more than composable technology, it requires composable thinking by the people in your business. People run your business. People meet with your customers and negotiate with your vendors. Your people make decisions and execute your business plans.
Agile leaders understand the power of composable thinking. They understand how their organization is composed and what function they deliver. Using this knowledge, they collaborate with other leaders to partner in designing and developing composable solutions.
Using the LEGO analogy, they figure out how their LEGO piece fits with the other LEGO pieces to build a new solution for the business. Leaders rely on a clear vision and understanding of the big picture to guide their decisions.
Agile Culture
In classic business models, the vision and mission rarely change. As a result, the strategies and culture of the company are resistant to change. You often hear, “we’ve always done it this way.” If your company culture is resistant to change, then your business will never be truly agile. An agile business requires an agile business culture.
Merriam-Webster defines culture as “a way of thinking, behaving, or working that exists in a place or organization.” Business agility is a new way of thinking that leads to new behaviors which are faster and more efficient for your organization.
Business agility is not a program or special project running in a few departments. True business agility requires a new business culture across your entire organization that places value on agile employees responding quickly to customer opportunities. A culture of learning, adapting, and moving quickly.
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