Today’s hyper-competitive world can be a tough place for many businesses. Large companies are always looking to produce better products while reducing costs, customers’ needs evolve and the world economy fluctuates at large. In a sentence, your business will face many threats. But how do you survive? Business agility.
A successful business knows when to bend, pivot and change to accommodate forces more powerful than itself, a process that requires business agility. Business agility can be used to adjust to market changes in addition to internal business changes.
What Is Business Agility?
Business agility refers to the company’s ability to quickly adapt to changes and fluctuations in its business environment. The faster a company can adjust its business strategy, the higher its business agility.
Business agility is an organizational method to help businesses adapt quickly to market changes that are either external or internal. If a business is set up to respond rapidly and with the flexibility to meet customer demands, they’re more likely to thrive and keep those customers.
Project management software can help you keep your ear to the ground and respond quickly to changes in the market.
Origins of Business Agility
The history of business agility as a concept begins with software development. It’s part of the agile framework that originated as a means to address the problems of changing requirements and uncertain outcomes due to the complexity of the technological project. The complexity of systems also lent itself to a fast-changing environment. The agile framework was developed to take advantage of the ever-changing project environments.
Some business agility ideas stem from the study of complexity science and the notion of complex adaptive systems, where a perfect understanding of the parts involved in a process doesn’t translate into a perfect understanding of the entire system’s behavior. The outcomes for software teams in such complex adaptive systems are unpredictable but eventually form a recognizable pattern.
Business Agility Framework
Taking the agile framework and applying it to business agility creates a tool that serves businesses of all types and sizes. It makes businesses more responsive to evolving customer and market needs. The business agility framework is exactly what businesses need in the dynamic, demanding and resource-scarce world.
Business agility demystifies business change and provides a simple and effective framework to respond to it. Business agility can help you maneuver market change, adapt products and services or map a successful route to launch something new.
Let’s review the three most fundamental elements of a business agility framework.
1. Business Agility Principles
There aren’t any agreed-upon business agility principles. However, it’s important that you create your own business agility principles as they play an important role in your business agility framework. These principles will guide both your team and the business agility value stream, so they’re critical for success.
To get started, you can review the original agile project management principles and lean manufacturing principles to create some for your company.
2. Business Agility Value Stream
The term business agility value stream refers to the sequence of steps that are required to quickly respond to an emerging opportunity or threat. Here are the main steps of a typical business agility value stream:
-Identify a business opportunity
-Conduct market research to find out what’s valuable to users
-Create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
-Deliver a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
-Choose whether to pivot or to persevere with the product
-Deliver value continuously
As you can see, business agility is about creating a minimum viable product that can be quickly produced and refined based on customer feedback. This allows for faster and better development, as opposed to traditional product development, where rigid phases are defined and the process is much slower.
3. Business Agility Team
Your team members are the ones who execute tasks, so it’s important that you review their skills and capabilities to make sure they’re a good fit for a business agility team. Remember to assemble diverse, cross-functional teams that can communicate with different areas and business units, as they’ll be pushing for company-wide changes.
