Business Agility
Agile – A way of working.
Agile. Start-ups, and really successful companies, such as Google and Spotify made this way of working very popular. Whenever that happens, that it becomes a trend, there starts to be a lot of fuss and buss, confusion, and sometimes even frustration, when companies try to implement agility into their own processes.
Let’s clear up the confusion.
To clear up the confusion, let’s take a closer look at distinguishing the “Business Agile” and other forms of Agile ways of working. One thing Business Agile clearly is not, is IT-agile. As we know, IT-agile is the birthplace of the Agile manifesto, where we have scrums, sprints, work breakdown structures, and so on. While this way of working has proven to work very efficiently in IT-development teams, it has proven to be perform quite poorly when implemented in other types of departments, such as finance, sales, or a management team.
Don’t do IT-agility scaled down
Something that works equally as poorly is trying to do the IT-agility but scaled down, where a consultancy comes in to push collaborative and more cross functional activities, which to be fair can work well in a start-up-scenario, but doesn’t work as well in a larger corporation. You have the same problem on the other side as well, where management consultants who, during the last couple of years have tried to push very elegant models that are way too complicated for any type of real life scenarios.
What is business agile?
So, what exactly is Business Agile you might be wondering?
Well, Business Agile companies execute their strategies faster. This in turn makes them grow faster, making them way more profitable than their industry peers.
Business Agility requires relentless execution in two skills, 1) knowing what to prioritize, from a bunch of different goals, what is the most important goal for us to focus on, and 2) Have the ability as an organization to gain the commitment for all co-workers to focus on these particular goals.
With these two skills in mind, you are well on your way to becoming more Business Agile.
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Introducing Business Agility
This video introduces “Business Agility” as a theoretical framework and a boomin trend – both in terms of what it is and is not. Business Agility is about a company’s ability to rapidly shit focus, to a new priority, in the entire organization and execute that n time.