Organizational Agility – Going Beyond Agile Development
Achieving Business Agility By Implementing Agile at the Organizational level
Is your organization implementing “Agile Development” but not yet seeing agility at the business level? Business Agility requires implementing agile thinking and practices in key areas throughout the organization.
Still, within the Product/Technology value stream, Business Agility covers the whole cycle from exploring options, selecting which initiatives to focus on and budget, through identifying the right product/features, into the development/build phases and all the way to delivery, deployment and monitoring/measuring/learning.
We help our clients achieve this level of business agility by combining classic techniques such as Scrum, Kanban, and scaling frameworks (such as SAFe™), with approaches such as Lean Startup, Design Thinking, Continuous Deployment/Delivery, and DevOps.
Looking even wider, Organizational Agility aims to improve the agility of other key areas such as Marketing, Budgeting/Finances, IT, HR, and more. We’re working with more and more of our clients on identifying which of their business process areas are the next constraints to business agility and growth and implementing the concepts of empiricism and flow in those areas.
Finally, we help our clients identify end-to-end operational value streams involving technology AND other business areas and create cross-functional multi-disciplinary teams/groups able to iterate fast on transformational initiatives involving multiple areas and aspects of the business.
In one example – a FinTech company in the Boston area undergoing a massive digital transformation – we started with helping their technology teams implement Agile using Scrum and SAFe. We continued to train all employees in the company (Hundreds of employees located on 3 continents) on the concepts of organizational agility and key agile techniques and then helped teams identify opportunities to experiment with these techniques – e.g. by using agile to plan and execute the yearly customer conference.
