As digitisation propels us towards the next industrial revolution, the need for organisations to unlock true business agility has never been more crucial. Yet, some still perceive this as purely hypothetical, a mere pipe dream. However, achieving business agility is possible and can contribute to the creation of strong organisations – rooted in innovation, built on a network of agile teams, supported by actively involved leadership, and employing innovative technology, it adapts to market changes and seizes opportunities as they arise.
Agility creates alignment and focus
The realisation that teams do not practice agility for its own sake appears obvious. However, some teams can be myopic – focusing on building high quality code with little attention given to the ultimate purpose it serves. Pride comes from technical excellence, on-time delivery and creating a high-output environment. This value system is admirable, but without aligning it with an organisation’s overall strategic objectives, it can result in excellent software that doesn’t help the business enhance its competitiveness in the market.
In addition, you get other key participants in the development life cycle focusing on their own narrow goals at the cost of the overall project: Product Owners are often pressured to prioritise features that please decision makers rather than customers. Scrum Masters often become Project Managers instead of custodians of Agile that maximise the productivity of the development team by helping it build software effectively.
Creating alignment between development goals, strategic goals and effective implementation of Agile is the desired state. It can help businesses create a competitive edge and empower them to become industry leaders. Teams need to understand how their projects and initiatives contribute to the overall strategic priorities.
The Product Owner should ensure that the focus is on features that help users and the Scrum Master should be an effective custodian of Agile. These points look simple in theory, but real-life complexities, incentives and constraints confound the people involved and undermine the development and delivery of useful and user-friendly software.
Agility creates adaptability and flexibility
Big organisations who’ve faced problems of scale increase red-tape as they go, to create standard processes across the organisation and maintain identity, culture and product coherence. It results in slow innovation and relatively long time to market. The many layers of decision-making and key decision makers (such as executives) not being on the ground can result in sluggish development, dilution of requirements and missing the most important user needs in addition to the aforementioned red-tape.
Increased adaptability enables a timely response to changing market conditions and allows for flexibility in strategy execution. Furthermore, it ensures the delivery of working software to customers incrementally and frequently. Therefore, organisations can get to the market faster, potentially beating the competition.
Agility creates customer-centricity
Organisations losing their touch is all too common. One observes rapid growth and high customer satisfaction early on and a plateau as the layers between the development team and customers increase.
User Experience Designers, Business Analysts and Product Owners strive to bring back customer-centricity, but they are often limited by ways of working, bad incentives and bloating of the core products.
Effective Agile practice emphasises customer feedback and incorporates it into development cycles. Developing in this way increases the chances of giving users what they need instead of developing based on educated speculation.
Agility creates cross-functional collaboration
Organisations play whack-a-mole with silos. As soon as they bring down one silo, another appears in it’s place. Slow communication, inadequate requirements and delivery issues are all too common and point to a failure: ineffective collaboration and lack of alignment among stakeholders. Cross-functional collaboration is desired and preached but is seldom ever achieved in the face of competing priorities such as cost reduction and faster time to market. A collaborative approach is valuable when planning and executing strategic initiatives that involve multiple departments or business units. It encourages shared understanding, collective decision-making and effective communication across teams.
Agility creates empirical decision-making
Experience, expertise and knowledge can sometimes undermine effective product development. As useful as they are most times, there are moments when they lead to confident assumptions being made about user needs instead of testing, learning and experimentation. The past doesn’t always resemble the future and conditions change, which means experience, expertise and knowledge can fall short. Agile methods encourage feedback loops and the continual assessment of team success periodically. This monitoring enables organisations to make data-driven decisions and change when necessary.
In addition, feedback loops and retrospectives shield against problems such as being stuck with bad practices, poor delivery and negative team dynamics, by surfacing areas of improvement and pushing teams to get better over time.
This continual gathering of information on quality of features, effect of development on the product and team dynamic brings empiricism to the process of software development, thereby minimising assumption-making and guesswork.
Effective ways to introduce, transform, and enhance ways of working.
Agile implementation has slipped away from us. Many organisations are deeply engaged in it, but opportunism and a desire for quick results have diluted the practice. We have forgotten that Agile is the mindset we should adopt and not the framework that makes it happen.
In our latest publication, we draw from our experience of working with local and international blue-chip organisations for over 20 years, and unpack various Agile methodologies.