Digital Master Tuning #69: Agility as Strategic Priority?

From doing agile to being agile, achieving agility is a strategic priority for any high mature digital organizations.
Agility is a quality that allows an enterprise to embrace market and operational changes as a matter of routine. A well-adapted enterprise strives to make change a routine part of organizational life to reduce or eliminate the organizational traumas that paralyze many businesses attempting to adapt to new markets and environments. Should agility becomes your top strategic priority:

Agility brings speed and flexibility: Strategy needs to be flexible, it is the objectives that drive strategy, so if you need to adopt a new strategy, agility should be your priority because it helps you achieve your objectives - better/quicker/faster- there is your justification. And objectives may of course change as well, but only subject to even more consideration. If you look at increasing speed of agility, it should get faster as you go from strategic objectives, through strategy and tactics to actions. Structures and processes in the organization should enable this and this is the challenge for leaders

The Agile principle applies to strategy-execution cycle as well: Once you have that vision of the well-defined goals, then the process can start. Break the goal to deliverable elements.  Each task is weighed and assessed and delivered in continuous burndown chunks with the flexibility to adapt in solution design. The greater the speed of change in the market, the greater the level of agility is required to respond to it effectively.

Balance stability and agility: In business, projects can be complex with uncertain outcomes and goals that can change over time. The main focus of agile methods is to address the issues of complexity, uncertainty, and dynamic goals. Agile methods integrate planning with execution allowing an organization to "search" for an optimal ordering of work tasks and to adjust to the changing requirements. The major causes of chaos on a project include incomplete understanding of project components, incomplete understanding of component interactions and changing requirements. Balance in everything. You need to focus on the well thought out strategy - and follow that star. But you do need the agility, that when markets move, you can move with them - or even better - ahead of them - and adjust the strategy accordingly.

Build the culture of agility: Before you can be agile, you need to 'connect' with all the workforce. Change is a continual factor. Creating a culture of agility gives companies a real sustainable existence with adaptability; moral - keep mentally and physically supple and agile. Be aware of the competition. Let the potential challenge of old and new competitors drive you to remain agile - and exercise!! Though it means being agile, not just doing agile. Too many companies flit from this month's flavor to the next with everyone getting demoralized and exhausted by too much agility practices. Devise strategy, then tests proposed initiatives to see if fall within your strategy, before diving into implementing them. You can initiate change that falls outside of your strategy, but you need to be aware that you're doing this and come up with a very good justification for doing so.

From doing agile to being agile, achieving agility is a strategic priority for any high mature digital organizations. So to achieve agility, you need to have a clear vision, a transparent process, a culture of change, an engaged workforce and an agile leader. And then, agility needs to be well embedded into the business processes to execute strategy seamlessly.

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