Business Agility- A Simple Guide

The What, The Why and The How

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We define business agility as the ability to respond quickly and efficiently to changes in the business environment and to leverage those changes for competitive advantage.

— Jason Bloomberg, The Agile Architecture Revolution: How Cloud Computing, REST-Based SOA, and Mobile Computing Are Changing Enterprise IT [1]

So what do we need to use market changes for organizations competitive advantage?

1. We need nimble systems that enable us to go from idea to cash at the speed of light. As fast as the FANGs.
2. We need an organizational environment where we can experiment with ideas, iterate over ideas as fast as we can.
3. We need the ability to Test and Learn by putting our Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) in customer’s hands.
4. We need ability to measure quantitative and qualitative feedback from the customers.
5. We need Continuous Architecture, the ability to defer Architectural decisions for a later stage if possible.
6. We need to decouple deployment from release, the ability to deploy silently in production- this would enable us to Test and Learn from our MVPs.
7. We need Continuous Security, Continuous Testing, Continuous Operations, Continuous Compliance. We need to build quality in, regularly and incrementally.
8. We need to automate everything- compliance checks, deployment in environment, production monitoring, security scans.
9. We need Team First approach- stable and empowered teams organized around the flow of value and around the desired architecture.
10. We need the ability to visualize software delivery value stream - the ability to measure and manage flow, identify bottlenecks in the value streams, hypothesize ideas to improve flow and to test and learn from these ideas.
11. We need a loosely coupled architecture- this is key to enabling fast learning cycles by limiting impact of design changes.
12. We need resiliency built in- fast time to recover, continuous monitoring, AIOps.
13. We need a culture that supports and rewards learning and experimentation.

Summary

Business Agility is the key to survival and growth in this age of disruption, we need to start asking for systems that accept changes in business environment and enable fast flow of value delivery. Business Agility requires us to organize in a team first approach around the product and desired architecture, invest in long term management and improvement of our Value Streams.

Business Agility requires us to unlearn Agility the way we know it.

References

[1]J. Bloomberg, The agile architecture revolution. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2013.