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Business agility

If agile is used throughout an organisation, it creates a visual real-time model of the business’s strategy, plans, journeys and day-to-day operations. The visual aids help to communicate and share information throughout the workforce and create a culture that promotes working collectively and productively.

The activities of the business are visible to all and show the team where they fit in, delivering value and sustaining the business, and how the business is structured. This can help to educate staff on the bigger picture of how their work fits into the organisation as a whole. Agile methods can be used throughout the business to promote wider business agility.

By adopting agile throughout a business, using a business roadmap, lean pipelines and agile dashboards, an organisation can communicate effectively the vision, the model, the objectives and the tactics for growth and development (see Figure 30.1). The information and transparency that agile produces provide insights into the effectiveness of strategies. These insights can be used to guide the direction of the business, and refine and develop its business model to ensure sustainable growth and success are achieved.

Figure 30.1 Business agility boards

At the highest level, the road map sets outs a rolling timeline forecast for future key milestones, goals, delivery expectations and associated trends, events and rhythms.

Lean pipelines show the stages of key business processes, such as production, new product development, customer journeys or change projects. The pipeline shows a real-time status and the flow of work from one stage to another within the business. At an organisational level, these pipelines connect teams and manage the transfer of work between them, helping to optimise business performance.

For stages of work or specific projects, more detailed agile dashboards represent the current and future workload of an individual or team. At this level, boards contain actionable tasks to complete and team performance metrics.

A business can form a series of interlocking boards that facilitate the handover of work at a more detailed level between teams, guided by the higher-level pipeline and roadmap.

The metrics from each board provide feedback on the productivity and capacity of the organisation, which can help to formulate business strategy and direction and empower individuals to contribute to decision making, and improve the overall agility of the business (see Figure 30.2).

Figure 30.2 Business agility

• Business agility – the state achieved when a business adopts agile methods and tools to visualise business direction, delivery pipelines and activity dashboards, providing a flexible and adaptable model for business planning, delivery and change management.
• Strategic roadmaps – providing a businesswide roadmap that communicates and provides a high-level timeline of high-level future goals, activities, projects and trends across the organisation.
• Teams and collaboration – as a practical set of empowering and collaborative methods and tools to manage the delivery of work, and provide insights to guide performance and improvements.
• Leadership and management – as a communication and performance model to provide insights to guide business direction and strategy. A tool to help teams to work collaboratively and efficiently towards a shared and common goal. A method to balance running the business efficiently with business growth goals.
• Lean pipelines – models and structures for mapping journeys and running the day-to-day business, using pipelines to provide a flexible strategy and plan for the delivery of products and services to customers.
• Business improvement – to support the growth journey of the business and help to sustain its competitive edge. This could include the use of agile for new product or service development, improvement of business systems and processes to streamline operations or improving the culture and teams within the business.

Adopting an agile mindset and utilising agile methods at an individual level raises a person’s self-awareness, increases productivity and performance, and empowers them to achieve personal career and professional development goals. When agile professionals work collectively using agile practices and thinking, in my experience the results speak for themselves. Agile helps to improve the value of the work delivered, increases satisfaction for the team and the customer, and create more harmonious and happier working environments.

The contents of this book represent an interpretation, adaption and translation from agile in software to agile in business. The cases, while anonymised and generalised, are examples of situations I have experienced in a number of different businesses through my experience working with them. Throughout the book I have given references, sources and information on some of the terms, practices and tools included in the book so you can explore them further.