Three Approaches to Pursue Organizational Agility

Being agile means anticipating likely change and addressing it deftly, keeping business on course and customers satisfied.

With the pace of change is accelerated, organizations need to be dynamic. A static organization is on its way out. Maturity is the agility and focuses on continuous improvement. Agility is the dynamic capability that allows organizations to adapt their substantive capabilities to business dynamic. But what are effective approaches to pursue organizational agility?

1. Identify and Assess the Changes 

Organizations are complex and to some extent self-healing and certainly change-resistant ecosystems. To make a significant change, or to improve performance, one needs to have a level of understanding about the consequences of change. The better you understand, the easier and faster change becomes. Hence, the business is agiler.

• The key to being agile and flexible is to have a good understanding from a strategic perspective of your current organization (structure, processes, locations, drivers, objectives, goals, applications, data, technologies), To be flexible you need to be able to change and you can't make effective change decisions if you don't know where you are. 

• In order to make effective changes,  you have to know the design of your business. How do you make changes to anything without knowing all the parts and how they are related? A mature organization is one that can quickly and safely assess all of the consequences of a possible change and devise effective plans to achieve and sustain those changes - and to do this continuously

• The Greiner curve models help to identify, anticipate and understand the root cause of problems at the stage of business growth. There are several crisis points in the life of an organization. Crises should not be avoided or feared but worked to overcome. At crisis points, this is when change becomes inevitable - deal with it! Equally, this means that change management tools such as EA will need to be low cost and high speed - responsive to the situation.

2. Understand the Changes in-depth with 3 Steps

Agility in organizational context does not equal to unrestrained possibilities. It is more about quick adaptation - whether the changes are small or disruptive. It is about striking the right balance between the types of capabilities that an organization possesses. That's the ethereal part, now for concrete ideas. There are 3 "P"s of a professional organization (Process, Project, and Performance Management). Agility comes from detailed process understanding as being about exactly that - understanding. You might have a clear vision about the endpoint but it won't happen, at least not safely, if you don't understand what needs to change and what the additional consequences of those changes will be.

(1) First, understand what your operational model is. Understand how that constrains your actions and capabilities. How it constrains your ability to adapt. If needed, create an organizational transition plan to move to a different operating model, and execute it in slow, painstaking steps. The slower, steadier you go, the further you'll get.

(2) Second, understand what capabilities your organization has - this could be business, it could be technology, it could be a risk. Classify them - they are not equal - some have more value than others to your organization. Based on that classification, create a roadmap to automate some of them, and make certain that your process designers use object-oriented patterns in doing so. Otherwise, all you'll be doing is recreating legacy processes which will impede your flexibility.

(3) Third, measure right. As the roadmap goes into execution mode, and the various projects go over budget and track toward late delivery, the one place you don't want to cut these efforts is metrics and measurement. Without instrumentation in your processes, your organization will lack the ability to make operational decisions based on quantitative information. That will not only impede your flexibility - but ensure that your successor has to go through the same steps. 

3. Best Practices for Organizational Agility 

You’d have to review the change management processes... typically change management does all it can to "hinder" agility in the interests of 'belt & braces' safety; whilst you don't want to throw caution to the wind, you need to be able to adopt a change process that fits with the new era of agile EA & BPM tools and recognizes 'configuration' of business rules vs. new functionality that fundamentally changes your platform(s). In order to have an Agile organization the following practices are necessary:

• Have an advocate for change on the Board 
• Have Change Management processes that actually enable change 
• Have a Center of Excellence for change 
• Simplify baseline processes and design them to be aligned 
• Have access to key metrics  

Being an agile company means being able to:

Launch a new product / pricing offer quicker than your competitors;

Better adapt organization to a change in the business environment

 Easily adapt to new regulations; 

Being agile means anticipating likely change and addressing it deftly, keeping business on course and customers satisfied. To achieve those goals, agility must be built into an organization’s very foundation, design for emergence, design for innovation, to make change a natural evolution.

Posted in: Business Process Management,Change Management,EA