Change the way you think about agile

For many busi­ness­es, adopt­ing an agile strat­e­gy is often tout­ed as a rev­o­lu­tion­ary deci­sion that can over­haul their oper­a­tions. It’s seen as a sure­fire solu­tion that promis­es trans­for­ma­tion­al results, until it doesn’t. Too often, busi­ness­es who hope to reju­ve­nate the way they work through an agile strat­e­gy end up spend­ing plen­ty of time, effort and mon­ey to achieve very lit­tle.

The rea­sons for that are var­ied, but at their core, they often come down to a sin­gle prob­lem. “Peo­ple don’t under­stand what agile is for,” says Andrew Husak, vice pres­i­dent of prod­uct archi­tec­ture at Emergn, a glob­al dig­i­tal busi­ness ser­vices firm with a mis­sion to improve the way peo­ple and com­pa­nies work.

“They look to it as a way of fix­ing a num­ber of busi­ness prob­lems with out­comes focused on the promise of ‘bet­ter, faster, more,’ when what they’re actu­al­ly solv­ing for is uncer­tain­ty. Basi­cal­ly, agile is applied to the wrong prob­lems. Com­pa­nies are focused on fund­ing short-term projects, com­pet­ing for bud­gets and main­tain­ing a cul­ture of con­trol, when the solu­tions lie in fund­ing long-term capa­bil­i­ty, invest­ing in val­ue propo­si­tions and cul­ti­vat­ing a cul­ture of empow­er­ment.”

Agile, rather than a thing to do or a goal, is a means to an end: a way to reach your desired busi­ness out­comes, and to devel­op a thriv­ing busi­ness that pro­vides valu­able prod­ucts and expe­ri­ences to the mar­ket, has pro­duc­tive staff and part­ners and is man­aged for sta­bil­i­ty and growth.

Most com­pa­nies want to offer pre­ferred prod­ucts and ser­vices to an expand­ing client base, and oper­ate in a way that sup­ports their busi­ness mod­el by keep­ing costs and labour time low. They do that by plan­ning and mod­el­ling to head off any issues before they occur. “But the premise of agili­ty is actu­al­ly chang­ing the way you think about, how you respond to, or even how you view the mar­ket in the first place,” says Husak.

That goes right back to the basic roots of how your busi­ness oper­ates. Becom­ing agile is a jour­ney, because agile meth­ods and tech­niques are very dif­fer­ent to the old ways of work­ing. They require a dif­fer­ent mind­set from man­agers – and a dif­fer­ent approach to struc­tur­ing work­flow and work­force. In order to adopt and adapt to this new mind­set, busi­ness lead­ers need to think about what out­comes they’re try­ing to achieve, and how every­one can align with those out­comes. They need to inves­ti­gate how their organ­i­sa­tion defines val­ue, and whether staff are pri­ori­tis­ing the most valu­able work through that lens.

That’s how it should be done. But many busi­ness­es strug­gle to adopt agili­ty to its fullest poten­tial because they focus on projects ver­sus prod­ucts as part of their attempt to gov­ern for cer­tain­ty, rather than the uncer­tain­ty embraced by an agile approach. They think they know what their cus­tomers want and need from them, with­out process­es for reach­ing out to them through exper­i­men­ta­tion to solic­it feed­back. And that lack of feed­back com­ing in leaves them unable to adapt and evolve over time to meet the chang­ing needs of their cus­tomers.

All of those issues stem from lead­er­ship either mis­un­der­stand­ing or mis­ap­ply­ing the agile frame­work to their busi­ness. The gen­e­sis of agile from soft­ware devel­op­ment was intend­ed to be rad­i­cal, but that requires plen­ty of trust from brave lead­er­ship. “It’s a com­plete upend­ing of your atti­tude to how your busi­ness actu­al­ly exists and needs to con­tin­ue to exist. This is usu­al­ly some­thing that requires con­tin­u­al­ly invest­ing in peo­ple and extend­ing their knowl­edge beyond the sta­tus quo; sup­port­ing them with access to experts and a learn­ing plat­form full of ideas and inno­v­a­tive think­ing,” says Husak.

One way to get out of the tra­di­tion­al way of think­ing and into a for­ward-think­ing, agile-open one is to adopt the three guid­ing prin­ci­ples that Emergn advis­es busi­ness­es
to con­sid­er:

1 Deliv­er val­ue ear­ly and often
Think in terms of small units of val­ue, which you can val­i­date with your cus­tomers while appeal­ing to them at the same time.

2 Opti­mise the flow of work end-to-end
It’s not sim­ply about learn­ing to work faster. It’s about find­ing ways to respond rapid­ly in unpre­dictable con­di­tions to elim­i­nate waste and delay.

3 Dis­cov­er qual­i­ty with fast feed­back
Pri­ori­tise learn­ing to find out what works and what doesn’t through exper­i­men­ta­tion and adapt your plans accord­ing­ly.

The prin­ci­ples don’t pro­vide pre-defined answers, but instead serve as a spring­board to agili­ty. Togeth­er, they make up a phi­los­o­phy that you can use to equip your lead­ers, employ­ees and part­ners to solve what­ev­er uncer­tain­ties your busi­ness future holds. All the mechan­ics of agili­ty, which are what most com­pa­nies con­cen­trate on, emerge from this phi­los­o­phy, not the oth­er way around.

These prin­ci­ples are imple­ment­ed by Emergn with­in hun­dreds of busi­ness­es world­wide who ask for an assess­ment of the way their busi­ness works now, what great looks like, and how to bridge the gap. That work begins by ask­ing ques­tions. “Our num­ber one hypoth­e­sis is that every busi­ness serves at least one mar­ket,” says Husak. “Do they know what that mar­ket is? Do they under­stand the cus­tomer?” Answer­ing that estab­lish­es the con­cept of val­ue for a busi­ness. It then leads busi­ness­es to think about who else can pro­vide that val­ue – to cus­tomers as well as share­hold­ers. It encour­ages them to con­sid­er com­peti­tors and their company’s place in the sec­tor. The rest fol­lows from there.

Change starts here: emergn.com/agile

Pro­mot­ed by Emergn