In Brief
- Agile Transformation: Agile transformations enhance enterprise agility, helping businesses improve customer responsiveness, operational efficiency, and employee engagement amid global challenges like Covid-19 and climate regulations.
- Expanding Agility: Beyond IT, enterprise agility promotes cross-functional, self-reliant teams that enhance productivity and product value through iterative cycles and user feedback.
- Value Delivery for Growth: Adopting enterprise agility uplifts the customer journey, placing customers at the center of decisions, thus increasing satisfaction, employee engagement, and operational efficiency for business growth.
Businesses all around the globe are racing towards transformations to help them achieve a level of enterprise agility with a marked difference on the bottom line. Being agile enables organizations to better respond to customer needs, increase operating efficiency, and build employee engagement.
Recent global events, including the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change regulations, have challenged traditional business models where size was often thought of as an advantage. The challenges faced and overcome during the pandemic have brought about an evolution in the hierarchical business unit model, replacing it with agile models for rapid responsiveness.
Agile Teams vs. Enterprise Agility
Traditional agile approaches focused on IT-specific roles – agile teams comprising developers, QA, project management etc. Enterprise agility extends the agile approach across more diverse teams ranging across the entire organization.
Team structure is cross functional and self-reliant for effective collaboration and maximized productivity. In other words, utilizing fewer resources to achieve better results. The resultant change in business processes is reflected in iterative cycles with improvement in products derived from user feedback. This maximizes product value for the consumer.
Adopting Agility Across the Organization
Successful transformations to enterprise agility are focused on increasing customer value and improving employee engagement. Mckinsey identifies 5 dimensions across which companies can implement changes for increased agility:
- Strategy: Shared purpose and vision across internal and external stakeholders.
- Structure: Empowered teams with cross functional capabilities.
- Process: Rapid decision cycles and knowledge sharing.
- People: Individuals with growth mindsets and the drive to learn.
- Technology: Rapid adoption of applicable technological trends.
Business Growth via Value Delivery
Adopting enterprise agility in response to rapidly changing consumer needs enables organizations to significantly uplift the customer journey. Agile transformations place the customer at the centre of every process, decision and outcome resulting in products/services that deliver more value.
As is the case with the design thinking model of product delivery, enterprise agility relies on continuous feedback loops to increment customer value and this also forms the basis of measurement of the transformations. Broadly categorized, benefits gained from enterprise agility fall into customer satisfaction, employee engagement and operating efficiency.
Takeaway
Enterprise agility has moved from a trending buzz-word to a must-have. Businesses prioritizing agile transformations are in a better position to gain sustainable competitive advantage. The journey will be unique to every organization as will the metrics used to define the success or failure of the transformation phases.
References:
What is Enterprise Agility and Why is it Important? (techtarget.com)
What Is Enterprise Agility and Why Does Every Business Need It? – Azeus Convene
Enterprise Agility: How to scale enterprise agility: PwC
Enterprise Agility | People & Organizational Performance | McKinsey & Company
