Organizational agility is characterized by the flexibility and ease with which an organization restructures and modifies its practices and processes when faced with unprecedented changes in its environment. Most of the companies have been very complacent with its achievements and think that what has been working for years will continue working, however, definitely the world has changed, customer needs and requirements are also evolving, and competitors are also changing, hopefully slower than us.
The challenge for the development of new capabilities, competencies and skills is imminent.
The flexibility and ease with which companies are able to respond to these changing environmental dynamics would help them strive and thrive in this competitive world. Responding to change may require making modifications to the existing practices and processes, reconfiguring, and realigning resources. Implementing agile practices and processes will serve the purpose if it contributes to the effective functioning of the organization.
Agility is a continual process by which the companies embrace change. Agile companies possess the ability to sense, perceive and anticipate changes in the external environment and convert these changes into opportunities that are in favor of the organization. An agile organization is characterized by fewer levels of hierarchy, less formalization, and decentralized decision making. Such organizations encourage distributed leadership and support self-organizing / cross-functional teams breaking departmental barriers encouraging lateral communication, participation, employee empowerment, and social interactions facilitating learning and innovation, collaborative and collective decision making.
Agile companies provide opportunities for continuous learning infused in everyday work across organizational levels, promotes inquiry and dialogue, and facilitates collaborative and collective thinking wherein employees share a common vision that is in sync with the organization‘s vision and purpose.
The main components of agility are people, intangible resources, and organizational culture. The knowledge, skills and competencies possessed by individuals need to be translated into collective learning and to channelize employee capabilities in the right direction.
Research has emphasized on change in the employees’ attitude and mindset crucial for organizations in embracing change, in the process of unlearning and learning new abilities, and developing resilient. Change can be effective in an environment that supports communicating the change to employees in advance, preparing them by providing required training and development reducing resistance and securing their support. Involving employees in decision making and promoting collegial relationship facilitates mutual respect for coworkers and trust in the management and leaders.
Although Agile methods have boosted success rates of new product development in software; now they are poised to improve innovation in nearly every function of every business.
The fundamentals of Agile are simple. To tackle an opportunity, the organization forms and empowers a small, focused, cross-functional, self-managing team. The team’s initiative owner, who typically comes from a business function and divides his or her time between the Agile team and key stakeholders, uses techniques such as design thinking to build a catalog of promising ideas or features.
The initiative owner continuously (and ruthlessly) ranks that list based on the latest estimates of value to customers, financial results, and other innovation initiatives. A process facilitator protects the team from distractions and puts its collective intelligence to work.
The team then breaks top-priority tasks into small modules, decides how much work to take on and how to get it done, and starts building working versions in short cycles known as sprints. The process is transparent to everyone. Team members hold brief daily stand-up meetings to review progress and identify impediments. They resolve disagreements with experimental feedback loops rather than through endless debates or appeals to authority. They test small working increments with groups of potential customers. If customers get excited, the increment may be released immediately, even if the boss isn’t a fan or others think it needs more bells and whistles. The team then brainstorms ways to improve future cycles and prepares to attack the new top priority.
This approach systematically targets common impediments to projects and other forms of innovation. It frees senior managers from micromanaging, enabling them to spend more time strategizing, removing impediments and increasing cross-functional collaboration.
It increases customer engagement and satisfaction by improving visibility and adapting to the customer’s changing priorities. It brings the most valuable products and features to market faster. It minimizes the waste inherent in meetings, repetitive planning, formal documentation, quality defects and low-value product features. The process also aims to create team members who are happier, more creative, more committed to success and better trained for advancement, thus reducing employee turnover.
Because Agile relies on empirical feedback loops and full transparency, performance metrics are integral to the process. Practitioners regularly monitor changes in metrics such as customer satisfaction, quality, speed, and employee engagement.
When talking about organizational agility, some thoughts come to mind:
Is your organization agile?
How do you measure organizational agility?
What are the attributes that facilitate agility in your company?
How do you address the weak attributes to enhance agility?
Agility is one of the accelerators of business success and sustainability. If you really want your organization to thrive, agility is an indispensable component, to move faster than the competition and to deliver real value to your customers and to your customer’s customers.
We are here to help!
