Business Agility

• The ability of an organization to adapt to new conditions and to change its direction
• Agility: the use of an empirical approach to incrementally deliver business value, measuring the effect of that delivery, inspection of the results, and adaptation based on learning from inspection
• Very important in these modern service-based format
• For instance, nowadays
  • companies need to be customer-oriented, rather than investor-oriented
  • users opt for simple and focused products / services instead of multi-functional ones
• to what extent are companies ready for the drastic change? The outlook is not so bright for giant organizations that adopts a strong bureaucratic, hierarchical and classical functional structure
  • why?:
  • employ a pyramid like organization have a structure where the power is concentrated at the top, but value is attempted to be created at the lowest ranks of the pyramid
  • thus speed and creativity are crippled due to the number of levels and procedures
  • Moreover, creation of a product / service depends on separate functional departments (such as marketing, software development, etc.) that focus on different targets / priorities
  • These departments are responsible for the production of part of a product / service that does not create value to the customers on its own
  • no department assumes full responsibility for a product / service from end-to-end
  • Decision-making procedures are prolonged
  • priorities clash in organizations not customer-oriented, in which value is divided among multiple parties, and value creation is made dependent, and where a strong chain of command is maintained
• Traditional Organization
  • instead of value creation within the organization, a constant tension is triggered
    • Management 🡪 Strategy Decisions, Rules, Power 🡪 Functional Silos
    • Functional Silos 🡪 Reporting 🡪 Management
• Agile Organization
  • flexible network structure which meets customer expectations and pathways from end to end
    • Within Delivery Teams: Collaboration, Between Delivery Teams: Co-operation
    • Management: Servant Leadership
    • Delivery Teams: End to End Value
• Traditional VS Agile
  • STRUCTURE: Functional silo-based / Team-based
  • DELIVERY FOCUS: Task / Value
  • PERFORMANCE FOCUS: Individual / Teams
  • FOCUS: Efficiency and Operation / Productivity and value
  • BEHAVIOUR: Command and control / Collaboration and Teamwork
  • PLANNING: Annual, big bang / Rolling wave, adaptative
  • Think big, work on details, deliver the perfect / Think big, start small, evolve continuously
  • DECISIONS DRIVEN BY: Assumptions and Forecast / by Data
  • BOTTOM-UP: Reporting / Intelligence
  • Long approval procedures need authority approval / Empowered Teams
  • TEAMS COMPOSITION: Horizontal (layers) / Vertical (Cross-functional)
  • MISTAKES: Limited Tolerance / Based on Experimentation and Learning
  • ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE: Mechanical and Cumbersome / Living those changes
  • ORIENTED: Investor / Customer and Value
• the new digital world will favor companies that can keep up with this trend and that adopt rapid change as its main distinctive competency: this new era will be dominated by agile companies
• gaining agility is not that easy. In order to gain agility, existing company structures and, more importantly, the culture and working methods should be changed from scratch
• The use of an EMPIRICAL approach to INCREMENTALY deliver business value, MEASURING the effect of that delivery, INSPECTING the results, and ADAPTING based on learnings from inspection
• There is no “one size fits all, or even most” approach
• Not only are organizations different from each other, but different part of an organization can be quite different
• Different people will look at empiricism and agility differently. Not everyone sees the same need, and not everyone has the same goal. Helping them feel that it’s ok to find their own way is an important step toward self-organization
• Helping people better understand their own need for empiricism and attitudes toward empiricism helps them to leave behind the “we need to become agile (whatever that is)” mindset and start to really understand what empiricism will do for them, and what they will need to change to reap its benefits
• Organizations who don’t understand why they want to become Agile also often take the wrong path to get there
• Agility requires empowering teams and helping them make their decisions, learning from their experiences as they go
• teams who didn’t understand why they were on an Agile journey, didn’t really want to be on the journey, and weren’t particularly happy about it: team going through the motions, telling management what they think they want to hear rather than really embracing Agile principles
• KEY FOR CHANGE:
  • They must organize themselves
  • People understand why they are on an Agile journey
  • Agile practices NOT forced: People really want to be on the journey, happy about it
  • Management needs to understand what Agility means or demands