Whether we are consciously aware of it or not, with the ups and downs, challenges and changes that we are all experiencing in recent times, the way of working and organisational decision making have entered a new era. Enterprises must reassess their digital transformation strategies and core competitiveness in a timely manner.
Through advancing enterprise agility, it accelerates the speed of digital transformation, innovation and other new processes. Hence, it is essential to adopt the right enterprise agility strategy for your organisation.
Impact on business
While enterprise agility is very different from agile software development, many parallels and principles can be drawn from the Agile Manifesto and Agile Principles beyond the context of IT.
Applying the spirit of elaboration, harmonisation and user-first approach from software to enterprise agility in providing services, is one of the centre themes of current Agile thinking. In other words, agility must be manifested within the enterprise DNA to generate value.
Imagine a traditional enterprise, burdened with legacy processes, systems and policies that are decades old that no one questions, “Why?”; intertwined with politics, silos and a culture of fear, where people do not feel free to voice out their feedback and ideas.
What if we can transform that organisation into one that is highly collaborative and interactive; focused on products and services that customers want; quick to respond to change and feedback, thus having a competitive advantage in stability and flexibility.
All the while keeping pace with an era of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Sounds too good to be true? In that case, enterprise agility is crucial more than ever for such transformation.
As part of the global agile research, McKinsey analysed the impact of enterprise-wide agile transformation, and their preliminary results identified three main outcomes of agile transformation: improved customer satisfaction, employee engagement and operational performance.
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The benefits are complementary to each other leading up to the fourth result: improved financial performance.
It starts with connected teams
You may be well aware of the numerous disrupters you face every day. It is not just the unpredictability of what is to come, it is also the velocity and pace of change that is creating silos and inefficiencies with your biggest asset– your people.
Can we get real-time visibility, can we align every team with the company strategy; can we optimise the internal workflow to enhance customer value?
All that has led to a fundamental question, how do we harness the power of digital transformation and enable new ways of working? Today’s market demands a higher level of cross-team collaboration and movement in order to successfully compete.
- Dev and IT need to work closely together to ship delightful customer experiences.
- Marketing and support teams may need to prepare for weekly or daily launches as product changes roll out faster.
- Finance and sales teams may need to be aligned to adapt to new pricing and packaging models.
- Executive teams need to make sure that shifting priorities gets reflected in the work that gets done.
These are just some examples of the cross-collaboration that modern companies need to adopt, but the bottom line is – it cannot just be your software teams that operate in an agile fashion.
The best innovation emerges when teams across your organisation are able to work better together. As the leader in your organisation, you have the opportunity to lead your teams into this agile way of working.
How to scale with enterprise agility
As your business grows and objectives evolve, your teams have to navigate even more complexity– across departments, business units, regions and timezones. The demands on modern teams increases the complexity of teamwork.
- Can you adjust your budgets and resources monthly or even weekly?
- How do you identify and resolve bottlenecks?
- Are you able to make tradeoffs decisions or pivots without having all the information?
- How do you account for changes in work allocation across teams, products and platforms, and are you able to properly staff the most important initiatives?
- What are all the dependencies between your teams and do you have visibility to them before they become a problem?
- How do you set objectives and ensure the entire company is aligned to the same goals?
Our experience shows that there are two things you need to master at scale. You need to be able to build the capability for your business and technical teams to rapidly deliver solutions while at the same time linking the work your teams are doing with clear outcomes and objectives.
How do we do this? One way is to provide a connected platform that takes into consideration your business’s strategic direction; identifies the outcomes that are important for your business; and connects them from epics to features to stories and tasks at the working level, in order to achieve clear alignment for management, business and technical teams.
Again, why do organisations take on this change to enterprise agility at scale？
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Here are a few examples of how we have seen companies winning customers as they have pursued their transformation goals.
- Decreasing time to market – in helping one customer tackle predictable delivery, we helped them to reduce their time to market by 40-50 per cent
- Improving quality – uncovering duplicative work, a major cost savings to the customer, which never would have happened if their work was not visible and connected across the organisation
- And finally, the opportunity to reduce the variance in team tooling and need for manual reporting. A single solution powered by real-time team tool data solves complexity and creates savings along the way.
Here is just a sample of the companies that have embraced enterprise agility. Ready to unlock the potential of your enterprise?
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