Why Improving Strategic Agility is Good for Business

We all know how team agile works, right!

Well just in case, the secret sauce is that it flips the organisational pyramid, giving control to the workers closest to the the thing of value - a product, a service, portfolio of products and service experiences.

Seems pretty simple

But many org don't get this right because of thier HR inspired L&M culture of command and control, even today, in multi generational workplaces, the 1, 2, and 3rd Industrial Revolutions ways are still prevalent.

The idea of Agile Teams/Squads/Pods of 7+/-2 people is to give them full end-to-end responsibility for the thing og vlaue.

This approach eliminates one of the biggest barriers to innovation: siloed thinking.

HOver, it can be taken too liteally in that long lived teams who speiclais ein thier thig o vlaue, ge complacengt in a BAU/Status Quo like state.

Strategic Agility

Is the enterprise's or portfolios way of sensing the market and quickly responding by changing/adapting strategy when necessary aka the now infamous Pivot or Persevere if you followed Lean Start Up, the Product Op Model or or perhaps Lean Portfolio & Value Management - were we get rid of long tails, dogs, for stars, cash cows to grow/explore and run/exploit the business at the same time in parrallel, in "Dualality"

Lack of Alignment to Business Outcomes

When Agile Team members see how their activities contribute to business outcomes, which gets the team aligned in pursuit of a common gaol - say a revenue target of X amount of unit sold per Quarter across the mature stage, thats a great thing, but very few teams, their IT based proxy Product Owners care or even no about the commercial realities, that business owners, customer service reps keep telling them with their heads in the sand and ready to argue how many lines of code they shipped this sprint.

Sprint Reviews, Show & Tells, Demos are all short term feedback loops and most often only involve people inside the business making assumptions - vey few teams have real customers to test with, or have organised focused groups because of cost, organisation and rewards/incentives/paybacks required to entice people into such groups. Good Agile Teams will use Kaizen or Continuous Improvement techniques and practices such as allowing 20 % of new work, new features, or enhancements into each load balanced sprint to actually deliver added/additional value beyond those dreaded single feature MVPs, instead of Most Loved Product or MVIs that add up over time.

Feature Factories, Bigger Teams, Tribes, Chapters etc little often develop/deploy more value.

just increase your fixed running costs, cost per sprint, per feature delivered, reducing ROI, margins from TtV, so at some point, at some time, a commercially facing/ savvy Product Manager/Service Manager has to analyse/optimise how to get more types of value from the thing - Persevering or look at Pivoting away/stopping and working on something net new, novel and innovative to surprise and delight folks.

Good news, is that What If Scenarios, Monte Carlo Analysis is done by a lot of work management tools, an AI.

AI

AI can support Team members, Product/Service & Portfolio explore potential avenues to improve, then create an execution strategy and deliver it in a number of successive two-week sprint. Under this method, process improvement isn’t merely iterative; it’s continuous, unitl that point, the market wants, desires something esle as the vlaue curve has gon and the team might moved from Scrum Sprint into more flow based/demand based, FIFO Kanban System instead.

With Lean-Thinking Managers and Agile Teams – Everyone is tightly involved in a solution.

Embracing Lean, Agile & DevOps based delivery as well as Lean Business Operations – everyone can apply Lean principles to understand value, where empathy lies in solving pain points, jobs to be done by the customer, map issues onto user/customer journeys/service blueprints to designing out via stories and continuously improving deliveries in support of having valuable business solutions in markets, however, it cant and deosnt go on forever.

Active Agile Management & CoD

There is a cost of delay to business today, that's ever increasing, and that's the risk of sitting on the status quo, or doing incremental delivery as opposed to net new novel innovations that take the business into new markets, territory, even into places it may have not considered through AIs predictions, patterns and anomalies detection, so hone your Strategic Agility to move fast, shorten the Time to Value, through scale and speed.

How - leverage not only Agile teams, but Agile Product Development, but most effectively, Lean Portfolio & Value Stream Management, so that like AIOps/NoOps - you're Strategic Agility Capability & Competency is already leading you to the next, not the now.

Check out my understanding your Agilities Feature!

The above is called Organisational Agility - the ability to redeploy resources around the thing of most/highest value, not to be confused with Enterprise Agility like Scaled Agile Inc, PA to name a few does/seems to do all the time as they fudge Scrum and Scaled Agile.

It means you can operate with both Stability and Agility aka the Dual OS or as I call it, Dualility, the old run/exploit the business whilst exploring/growing the business, best of both,ying and the yang, the thing many start up fail to learn fast - cash is king, product is still king, not data unless you make your money from selling data as a product or service!

The acid test, is if you understand Org and Strategic Agility, at your Quarterly Portfolio Reviews, you will be seeing the call from Directors et al to create new Value Streams and stop others in your Value Stream Network to fous on said Value, long lived co-located teams are a thing of the past, we even had remote and distributed working before co-located, everything isn't infinite, it has a useful lifecycle, and if you understand that, then disruptive disruption as a process is less likely to have as big of an impact/affect.

A Responsive, Adaptive Conclusion then...

Strategic Agility is Good for Business as it allows you to be responsive to market trends and curves, or even better, anticipate them, and get ahead by pivoting earlier than others to find new markets, niches, product or service experiences to offer.