Why is Business Agility even a thing?
First, do you know what I mean by Business Agility? If you don’t you should probably go explore the Business Agility Institute (BAI) website, an organization dedicated to the topic. Business Agility is the future of agile, a mindset that extends agile principles, behaviors and actions beyond the technology portion of an organization.
BAI conducted a survey of nearly 400 individuals from 166 companies around the world to understand the current state of Business Agility. Know what they found? Almost everyone still sucks at it. Especially as an organization grows, it’s harder to stay aligned between all divisions and departments. It’s hard to stay lean and focused. Young startups get it, but that level of attention to detail gets lost the larger a company gets. It’s no wonder that most any consulting company can find millions of dollars of savings just by exploring the lean waste in the average company. Do you think there are any initiatives that your company is spending a lot of money on that don’t align perfectly with the mission, vision, goals and objectives of the company? It’s not just misalignment, but it’s a lack of coordination and collaboration and communication between the departments and divisions. Do you work somewhere that sales and marketing know exactly what the product teams are working on and use the same timeline, dates and dependencies in their plans as new features and products are released? Does customer support get a walk through of the release notes after every sprint release so they know what to expect from customers working with new features? In my experience, there are a myriad of disconnects within most businesses. And the busier we get in our own departments, the harder it becomes to address these gaps of communication.
On the surface, it almost seems ludicrous that we should even need Business Agility to be a thing. And I bet some CEOs feel the same way. If you asked them, “Do you think your product and technology teams are working on the exact initiatives to best support your organization’s vision, mission and objectives?”, I bet most CEOs actually think they’re pretty close. But the scary truth is they probably have NO idea. If they don’t align their budgeting and fiancial spend forecasts in lockstep with product and program feature roadmap changes, they’re already off the mark. Most companies still define annual budgets and perform big annual planning events. How close do you think the average company’s general ledger of accounts accurately reflects the spend and effort and depreciable assets the company is producing?
I think of it like a big game of telephone. Most executives are really great with big picture, visionary concepts and delegate the details of execution to their direct reports. The larger an organization, there are often multiple layers of delegation before you get to the teams actually doing the work. I’ve worked places with 7 layers. That’s a lot of middle management, division management, and regional management. Somehow the trickle down of information gets translated and delegated and each middle manager has the opportunity to put their own spin and make their own judgement calls on whether or not a particular effort makes sense. In the end, it becomes easy to justify spending time on a project and using the company’s time and money on something that delivers value from a particular point of view. But very rarely in an organization is there one pivot point where all things are on a level playing field to know of all the things you could do, what makes the most sense. This is one of the core challenges as I see it. Portfolio Management is one way to implement and address this challenge. But as we’ll see, it’s just one of many things an organization can do to gain business agility at scale.
In a few upcoming posts, I’ll share my practical agilist’s perspective on what you can do to help your organization achieve greater business agility. I’ll also share what I think the business agility roadmap looks like for an organization as they gradually mature their agile processes.
I’d love to hear stories from both sides.
- What have you seen in your organization that causes executive leadership and execution teams to be out of synch? What behaviors and challenges exist that reduce the level of communication between departments and divisions?
- And what have you done or seen that helps your organization have greater Business Agility? What practices or activities do your people do that improve coordination, communication and collaboration between departments and divisions?
In my experience, there are some departments that are more likely to be more closely coupled with product and technology and some that are often the most disconnected. What’s your experience?
