Have you ever thought of adapting to new changes in the world where businesses are coming up with innovative ideas to compete?
Adaptation has always been helpful to companies. But how could a business survive in the harshest circumstances, like terrorist attacks, unanticipated regulations, and sudden market change? The answer to this is one word – “Agility“.
Agility can be defined as “efficiently and successfully adapting to ever-changing and uncertain environments.” This help organizations cope with the new sources of global competition they constantly face. In short, Agility is “responding to an uncertain change quickly and effectively.”
Businesses worldwide are considering how they can return from the torment caused by the coronavirus. Only those companies that manage to be agile internally and externally could survive in this scenario. This could be done by successfully operating the financial growth rates while prioritizing consumer needs.
Advantages of agile transformation
Small positive changes would be witnessed while on the journey towards Agility. Some of them could be listed as:
- Higher product quality
- Faster product delivery
- Averting product shortage errors
- Ability to incorporate changes
- Elimination of errors
Adopting Agility
Agility Drivers
Many factors motivate companies to achieve Agility. Among them are environmental changes, the threat of entry of new players, sudden change in customer loyalty, and the increasing number of viruses in IT departments.
How to adopt Agility
In actuality, there is no cookbook for being agile. A company must respond to sudden problems and quickly develop solutions to counter those problems. There are some methods listed below that help the company to prepare for the drastic changes. These are:
- By giving more power into the hands of experienced team members.
- By breaking down projects into shorter segments, testing and allowing for failure.
- By granting trust and autonomy to each team member
- Putting up-to-date microlearning content at your employees’ fingertips allows them to learn in the self-sufficient, self-reliant ability that agile business demands.
Types of Agility:
Though Agility has almost nine types, we will comprehensively discuss two main types – Business Agility and Organizational Agility.
Business Agility: A business is agile if it can adjust quickly to meet the needs of its customers and supply them with the finest possible products.
Organizational Agility: Being agile means quickly rearranging services within an organization to respond to changing client demands.
In a true sense, Agility consists of business agility and organizational Agility.
Critical Considerations while adopting both agilities
- How frequently does your company consult with consumers to decide what to work on next?
- How quickly can the work be finished once a commitment to accomplishing it has been made?
- How frequently may newly completed work be delivered and put into service?
Process
So, what’s the course when you are on the way towards agile transformation? Here are some aspects of the agile transformation journey.
Understanding and Embracing Agile Mindset
Making the mindset of change is the first step towards transformation. Every member of the company should accept the agile mindset, and elegant ideas must be addressed through the team’s leaders. Collaborating on a common goal makes the transformation work. Once everyone embraces the importance of an agile mindset, we can move to the next step – Agile training.
Agile Training
Training enables a sense of value in workers. It shows them that you are loyal to a specific motive (Agility in this case). Making teams and assigning team leaders could enhance the agility training process. The importance of Agility could be addressed through proper channels, like presentations, analyzing past projects, daily meetings, and statistical analysis of agility transformation.
Building Transformation Roadmap
A roadmap will help you set up goals and objectives and corresponding milestones that lie on the way. A roadmap for agile transformation is given in the figure below
Risks in Acquiring Agility
Most companies have different external bodies that help them excel in the market. If a company moves towards acquiring Agility, it might happen that the stakeholders and funding bodies are not ready for that. It is also possible that the external bodies cannot follow Agility. This could be an obstacle and a risk for the company. This could be countered by making a mutual understanding and coming up with an agreed-upon solution.
Challenges in Adapting the Agile Environment:
Internal Challenges:
- Project Team: The coordination between agile and non-agile teams in large projects appears to be challenging.
- Organization Project: Agile projects have a different mindset and information demands than traditional organizational units in larger organizations.
External Challenges:
- To customer: Successful collaboration with customers and other stakeholders is essential. Working with traditional customers is challenging for an agile project.
- To Subcontractor: Traditional Subocontractors slow down the agile process and complicate synchronization. Also, agile subcontractors of traditional teams might cause an issue.
- To Regulatory Authority: The requirements posted by regulatory authorities have to be considered. Regulated organizations have to provide evidence to fulfil regulations, leading to a focus on documentation. You need a specialist to help you manage the risk of delays while maintaining the quality of the solutions you create for your customers.
Some other challenges are listed below:
- Working with contractors who can’t or won’t join you on your Agile journey will jeopardize its success.
- Lack of investment to fund the Agility Transformation, e.g., Buying the required tools.
- Lack of check and balance to ensure Agility leads the way down from transformation.
- Staff members who can’t be agile can be most destructive (though proper, this could be reduced by appropriate training, but this takes time).
Conclusion
In conclusion, Agility is the most critical factor in modern business management. Every business must make regulations to adopt Agility to compete in the market. Agility transformation is all about building and following a roadmap throughout the journey. Though many risks and obstacles come in the way, mutual exertion could eliminate these. Having specialized resources in the form of agile team members, agile coaches etc., will speed up the agile adoption of agile practices and help you transition into a truly Agile organization.