Over the years, I have optimized many Information technology teams by leading them through agile transformations and enabling them to improve speed and customer orientation. It’s been didactic and quite rewarding to witness the business value that can be unlocked through this type of change. Unfortunately, over these many years, perspectives about Agile have not materially expanded from executing projects using Agile methodologies to fully unleashing agile organizations. This is unfortunate because full organizational agility is now necessary not just in order to win or thrive but increasingly, in order to simply survive.
What is an agile organization?
Agile organizations don’t simply dispatch a couple of teams to execute projects quickly using agile methodologies. They purposefully re-architect themselves to be able to move swiftly and sustainably towards larger objectives, making timely shifts as they encounter obstacles and moving rapidly to seize new opportunities. Effectively orchestrating internal and partner teams they:
Quickly generate and assemble meaningful insights.
Rapidly transmit insights where they are most needed to drive prompt decisions and actions.
Efficiently Implement effective changes & projects using agile delivery techniques.
Quickly determine and correct missteps in project execution
Continuously Incorporate insights to improve future decision making and actions.
The Necessary shifts
Operating in this new way requires a few critical shifts. Depending on the state of your organization, a transformation and not a shift may be required.
1. Focused and cohesive. The speed and agility of most organizations is limited by two basic obstacles: 1) they are deeply internally divided and 2) They try to do too much. With limited resources, the result is often pernicious competition, toxic infighting and fragmented pursuits that deliver limited value. In these organizations, decisions take too long, insights are hoarded and mistakes are covered up.
2. Customer-centric. Project-centric organizations are focused on delivering projects. They usually celebrate success in terms of # of projects completed, on schedule and under budget completion. Customer-centric companies on the other hand are focused on continuously evolving or transforming products and services to serve their customers. Truly customer-centric organizations can move faster because employees at all levels: 1) Understand how their day to day work serves the customer and 2) Are empowered to act to improve customer experience 3) Are incentivized to share insights and collaborate across teams for the higher purpose of serving the customer.
3. Data/insight-driven. There is definitely room for subjectivity, experience and gut when it comes to making business decisions. However, the vast majority of decisions can be improved and accelerated using data. This is particularly important as organizations grow in size and when the number of people involved in both decision making and execution increases. Data-driven organizations are often more agile because 1) They guess less and can move with conviction. 2) They make fewer wrong turns because actions are insight-driven and 3) When they make wrong turns, they are better positioned to use data to detect and correct these missteps.
4. Architected for change. We live in a sea of change and certainly cannot predict every change that our organizations will confront. However, we can proactively architect our organizations to better anticipate and more effectively deal with change.
a. Anticipate points of change. Knowing the likely locations, frequency and impact of changes will allow you to be less reactive and more strategic.
b. Direct the change. Changes are painful if they occur in locations/ types and times that we cannot effectively manage. Redirect changes away from inflexible, brittle, unmanageable or bottleneck areas of the organization.
c. Exploit the change. Not all changes are undesired even those seemingly unpleasant, externally imposed ones. Wise organizations use change to accomplish more. They look for opportunities to advance other aspects of their strategic goals.
d. Can execute with speed. Moving quickly and delivering incremental changes provides feedback loops that allow organizations to either continue, stop or redirect the project.
e. Manage change. While flexible processes and nimble systems help, change ultimately remains a people issue. A complete appreciation and investment in change management will ensure that pronouncements of success are not premature and that your results are not ephemeral.
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