Agiliy, Ability, Disruptivelocity>>By Anshumali Saxena, ‘Thrive-Drive’ Expert
Agile Transformations deliver great value -Success and survival for everyone is constantly under threat in today’s hyper competitive world. Today demanding customers and disruptive technologies are forcing individuals and organizations to embrace agility across all processes and functions. Organizations now seek to transform themselves into value driven enterprises that proactively address change as a revenue creating opportunity and do not view it as an expensive cost head. This rate of change is continuously accelerating as customers themselves need to embrace agility to stay competitive in their respective fields. Hence agility as an embedded ‘ability’ is a necessity for everyone in the business ecosystem: developers, providers, partners, user-customers and their end-clients. From nations, organizations to individuals everyone is embracing agile transformation priorities to create new rules of success and new opportunities of better value creation where none existed before.
Agility and not size is key to sustaining success -Today’s interconnected world of global businesses works 24X7 and constantly seeks to create new avenues of success and revenue sources from around the world. People and businesses now seek to source best-in-class and not just best-of-breed solutions as they need to scale up their own excellence on a continuous basis. Provider organizations consistently need to create new value and continuously improve quality levels to stay relevant to their customers’ ever increasing demands and changing life-challenges. Better communication and seamless collaboration allow customers to become key stakeholders to the success of development projects and this forces everyone to deliver agility with better velocity on a continuous basis. Managing change requests on the fly and delivering better outcomes faster on a continuous basis is no longer a luxury but a necessity because competitors in different parts of the world are quick to unseat original suppliers with smarter, cheaper solutions. ‘Survival of the smartest and the most agile’ has replaced ‘survival of the fittest and the biggest’ of the earlier eras. For businesses to stay afloat in this globally agile world they need to embrace agile transformation enterprise-wide on a continuous basis. From business strategy, project development to delivery and customer experience management organizational growth depends on agile transformations being embedded as a necessary ‘success-culture’ across all management practices viz. lean processes and quality management, continuous people empowerment and use of smart technologies .
External experts driven Agile Transformation deliver better results - As agile transformations become an everyday reality across all internal and external processes organizations are benefiting from better ‘agile-transformations’ by employing external experts and leveraging their proven expertise. With their unmatched process and people neutrality and access to latest best practices in a constantly evolving ‘agile-transformations’ management field, external consultants and trainers bring unique benefits and unmatched ROI gains. External consultants expertly dissect different processes with ease and create innovative new processes and smart process-fusions by simply accessing success stories from their other client engagements with similar business challenges. Hence external experts are able to motivate different team stakeholders and build faster buy-ins to difficult changes by projecting better outcomes with relative ease. Agile transformations guided by external experts are now delivering better value with faster change management acceptance across different departments and people designations.
Building & Sustaining the Agile Transformation ‘Success-Momentum’-With the spread of agile transformation across all businesses, big and small, the agile-revolution has been won by its global evangelists and domain experts. Agile methods of different varieties are today being used by a vast majority of product development and service delivery teams (72% according to latest research findings) and the beginning of a brave new “Agile-Evolution” wave is already underway. This is now less of a revolution and more of a reality because agile transformations are mainstream and their inescapable benefits are clear and easily demonstrable. It is important to understand that agile transformations are different for every organization / team and their key success- factors are constantly evolving. These constantly changing ‘success-factors’ need to be addressed fully to allow people to continuously benefit from their far reaching, better ROI outcomes.
Agile transformations mainly drive changes in an organization’s overall culture and work approach. Agile transformation is not about implementing piecemeal development processes and is certainly not about implementing select ‘tools’. Agile transformation is actually a set of values that an enterprise needs to fully adopt to continuously deliver better customer value faster. All team leaders and process champions need to ensure that everybody is set up for success and fully motivated to embrace constantly evolving changes however unpalatable they might be initially because their end outcome is always desirable. Key steps needed to enable agile transformations to deliver better value are:
- Straightforward and transparent development / delivery processes across the entire project / business life-cycle.
- Continued top management support with complete insulation from unwarranted organizational-bureaucracy.
- Joint ‘outcomes-responsibility’ across different project members including own-business, partner and even client stakeholders.
- Real-time access to accurate, unbiased data and all relevant information.
- The right tools to facilitate better productivity as opposed to unfriendly tools/techniques that create confusion and users’ friction.
Forward looking and customer-delight focused ‘nimble’ organizations are today highly successful by embracing agile transformations’ values and embedding agility enterprise-wide as a work-culture necessity.
Agile Transformations is a long term evolution - Agile transformations need time and perseverance to be fully successful as they are not ‘overnight-miracles’. To fully benefit from these transformation stakeholders and teams need to move ahead with patience as installing new processes and instilling brand new values do takes time. It’s like asking school teachers accustomed to teaching in traditional classroom styles to suddenly change to a more global and collaborative process with smart technology enabled custom learning plans for different children over one semester. Without a super-human effort it is not a ‘fair’ request. Similarly agile transformation to deliver value does require significant efforts and ongoing consulting, training, mentoring, coaching and investments in better technologies and processes It’s imperative that a firm effectively transform itself to its new agile-reality quickly to reap unmatched benefits in short term and in the long run.
Beware of short-cuts as cutting corners and ‘in-bred’ low cost solutions could delay success and push up costs with unforeseen errors. In fact these unprofessional failures are probably the biggest reason why companies fail to fully benefit from today’s smart agile-transformation reality. Leadership needs to be wary of people who combine the words ‘easy’ with ‘agile’ in the same breath (unless they include ‘not’ of course!). As the agile-transformation evolution gathers momentum the real natural selection of successful organizations has already begun with non-believers biting the dust globally — pretty quickly. With new competition realities accelerating this evolutionary process, the rate at which organizations scale up agile transformations will determine their survival chances today and tomorrow.