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Agile facilitation is the art of managing groups and providing the fundamentals so they can work collaboratively and identify a path forward that most stakeholders can buy into. It also builds the foundation for team self organization.
How do you facilitate in agile?
As a facilitator in agile, you need to use techniques and team coaching to ensure the goals of a meeting are realised. Ideally, all stakeholders will feel they have been listened to and that they can buy into the conclusions of the meeting.
What is the role of a team facilitator?
The role of an agile team facilitator is to promote a facilitation mindset as well as guide and manage the agile team to be successful by using agile principles. This includes identifying and helping remove blockers to make sure a team can meet their objective. This is different from a scrum master role as the agile facilitator is framework agnostic.
What are the benefits of agile facilitation?
The benefits of agile facilitation are that meetings are properly managed and make all stakeholders feel heard, reduce confrontation and enable a team to come up with objectives everyone can agree on. This applies if the meeting is in-person or online.
5 Agile Facilitation Techniques: You Need to Make Your Meetings Go with a Bang
In the sphere of agile transformation and development, agile facilitation is a discipline in its category and the role of an agile team facilitator is making sure the conditions exist for a meeting’s objectives to be realised. This goes far beyond standard agile practices and it can be a tricky task to play little part in the meeting, but still guide it in the right direction.
If you’ve either been designated as the agile team facilitator or chosen the role, you might have had trouble fulfilling it, so with this in mind, here we look at some effective agile coaching and agile meeting techniques so that your meetings achieve everything they set out to do and reach the desired outcome for all.
TECHNIQUE #1 – DOT VOTING
Whether the team members are business analysts, marketing executives or software development experts, the first technique for designing meetings with your team is one that offers a voice to everyone in the room. A consensus is formed by going to each person individually and getting their opinion. After you’ve gone around the room, the ideas are ranked by popularity and either acted upon or discarded. This allows people to go further than their core competencies and explore other potential ideas.
TECHNIQUE #2 – BRAINSTORMING
Whilst brainstorming is not a new concept, by any means, it’s still an effective way to kick-start your meeting. Also known as ‘affinity mapping’, it’s a great way to get ideas out there that otherwise might not see the light of day. From agile coaches to agile project managers, there are ways to map out ideas that balance the team overall.
TECHNIQUE #3 – SPIDER WEBBING
Another fun way to innovate is a game-based technique known as spider-webbing, which is essentially a type of context diagramming with your own set of rules woven into proceedings. It’s a fun way to gain insight into the flows between departments, systems and having team leaders mentoring people within a team and it’s something that only involves using pictures i.e. no words. It’s also something that will break the ice and get the creative juices flowing. It makes for an interesting learning experience.
TECHNIQUE #4 – PRE-MORTEM
A fantastic way to address risk management is pre-mortem, which relates to death-planning and it involves considering things like your bucket list, as well as things you can do to remain safe and healthy. It might sound morbid, but it helps get the discussions started and it can yield really meaningful results as well as set up learning objectives overall for the team, getting them thinking about retrospectives rather than just pre-requisites for instance.
TECHNIQUE #5 – BUY A FEATURE
If you’ve ever felt frustrated by the inability of stakeholders to make decisions relating to prioritisation, Buy a Feature is a great technique for getting people talking about it. It will likely not result in agreement all around the table, but during the process, you will typically gain useful insight into what’s important, review core facilitation tools and needs, while looking at several potential iterations and the areas in which negotiation might be possible.
IN SUMMARY: What is good facilitation for an agile mindset?
The role of an agile team facilitator is diverse and these are just some of the innumerable techniques that you can use to be an effective agile facilitator and you can believe us when we say that there are many more. You can develop your style, of course, but if you get stuck and you don’t feel like the meetings that you’re facilitating aren’t meeting their objectives, injecting a little structured fun into proceedings can help all teams focus, whether project managers or product owners or any representatives across the entire organization.
People think better and are better at decision making when they’re stimulated and that’s exactly what these kinds of techniques are designed to achieve. Get creative in your meetings and you might be surprised about what you can achieve with your team members.
Learn more on how to develop your facilitation skills and how to adopt a facilitation mindset. Contact Leadership Tribe today.
Kanban board is one of the agile project management tools used by remote teams and in-office agile teams. Putting your tasks on the Kanban board and envisioning/visualizing the workflow helps teams better understand the procedures and obtain an overview of the workload. It helps in removing useless and wasteful information. You can quickly identify the problematic work stages, and your team will work efficiently.
Over the internet, you will find many kanban board examples, but how you will identify which methodology is suitable for you? What are the best ways to use the kanban tool, and how do successful project managers utilize the online Kanban boards?
If you have no answers, we’ll figure this out together and discuss the necessary details, whether you are a pro or beginner.
Keep Calm, and Let’s do Kanban Board!
What is a Kanban System?
As per the principles of Kanban, it is a method of scheduling that boosts the visual use of the imagination to organize the task work in advance, pre-planned deliveries, and much more. The name of the Kanban system is created and derived from the Kanban Cards that tracks the production. You can improve the workflow consistency and offer reliable yet faster delivery to clients by confining the work in progress (WIP) and applying specific policies in the team.
As mentioned before, Kanban is a project management tool that processes improvement methods. Software teams use kanban boards to enhance the efficiency in software development. The primary purpose of the Kanban system is to eradicate the bottlenecks and backlogs in the workflow.
What is a Kanban Board?
A method of work management that utilizes a digital kanban board or physical board with cards and columns is known as Kanban Board. The columns organize the tasks with the help of their present stage or progress in the development; on the other hand, cards represent the tasks.
Kanban is a Japanese word that means Billboard. Toyota developed this concept in the 1940s to execute just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing. Nowadays, this to-do tool is used in almost every industry but most notably used by the software development teams. Agile teams use this tool due to its visual interface, ease of use to reduce work, and immediately seeing what everyone is working on. Plus, it offers visual signals into the task’s progress and what a particular task is holding up in the project.
Elements of the Kanban Board
Kanban boards use the WIP limits, cards, columns, and swimlanes to manage the workflows and allow the team to visualize effectively.
Kanban Cards: These cards represent the tasks visually, and each card has information about the task and its status, including assignee name, description, and deadline for the work.
Work in progress limits: This helps limit the maximum number of tasks in different workflow stages as restricting the WIP allows you to complete the work items faster by limiting the team to focus on the present tasks.
Swimlanes: The horizontal lanes you can use to split the different activities, services, teams, and more.
Columns: Every column on the board depicts the workflow at different stages, and the cards have all the workflow mentioned until their completion.
How does a Kanban Board work?
This task management board works by charting the work items to digital or physical sticky notes placed into the columns on larger boards. The columns of boards portray a value stream- specific products or steps sequence that must go through from start to finish. The work items are written on the cards and then positioned in their columns.
For different types of work items, cards of different colours are used, whereas swimlanes are used to organize the workings of the team on one board. Also, WIP limits are placed on the few columns’ capacities to make sure the flow of work is smooth, and team members pull the cards and shift them through columns from left to right with the progress of work.
Columns of the Kanban Board
A typical Kanban board has three sections/column:
To Do
This section has all the tasks that need to be done. The task initialization is done based on the task conceptualization. Then the task is added to the column and the lead time starts when the tasks are added to the To-do column.
Work-In-Progress
This column has those tasks that are currently are in development by the specific team members. The amount of time required in-progress stage is called the “Cycle Time”.
Done
Now, the tasks that are in progress are completed and delivered. The amount of time invested in the whole task, i.e. from initialization to the done stage, is known as “lead time”.
Kanban Method
Different methods of using the Kanban board, and different teams customize it according to their workflow. But these are some of the typical steps of using the Kanban Board:
Determine and visualize the workflow of your team. After defining the workflow, your team can imagine the work so everyone can follow.
In the second step, break the workflow into different stages by personalizing the Kanban chart and splitting the workflow into more small stages. This way, you will capitalize on the team’s efforts to achieve the tasks successfully.
Always consider each stakeholder input and use the stakeholder mapping to know whom the most important people are involved.
Make sure all the stakeholders understand each stage as due to the workflow openness, each member can recognize who is working on what task in each separate stage only by looking at their Kanban Board.
You can enhance the flow of work by limiting the work in progress. By implementing the real-time metrics, you can work together with the team members to predict future problems.
In the last step, you can measure effectiveness by tracking the flow, lead time, and quality of the task by comparing it with the other criteria. Plus, in the whole process, the metrics should be analyzed.
Conclusion
No doubt, kanban boards are the true saviour when it comes to project management. This board can help manage tasks, organize the work items, enhance the quality and time of delivery, and optimize the team’s efficiency. There are many kanban project management software available in the market like Trello, Jira and kanban tool that helps the management to work effectively.
Kanban is a prevailing system used to execute DevOps and agile software development. It involves fully transparent working and real-time information of capacity. Kanban boards display work items to let the team members see the work they need to do whenever they want.
In other words, Kanban is a system that provides visual means of managing work when it moves from one level to another in a given process. It visualises the workflow and the actual work passing through. Kanban aims to identify and fix the potential bottlenecks in the process, so the overall workflow is throughput or cost-effective at optimal speed.
Kanban in Software Development
Nowadays, agile software development teams can leverage the usual Just-in-time (JIT) principles by corresponding the amount of work-in-progress (WIP) to the team’s capacity. It offers continuous improvement by providing them with flexible options for planning, clearer focus, quick output, and precision during the development cycle.
An Agile Methodology
The one thing that distinguishes Kanban from Scrum is that it is not iterative. In contrast, Scrum processes have short iterations, which clones a project lifecycle on a smaller scale with a clear beginning and ending for each iteration. Kanban is an agile methodology that allows software development in one considerable cycle time.
Kanban fulfils all twelve principles of the Agile manifesto as it is incremental, not iterative. Since there are no Kanban project iterations, it has no defined beginning or ending for each work item. In this way, the work items can initiate and terminate independently and have no pre-determined period.
How Does it Work?
Kanban utilises the phases in the software development lifecycle to illustrate the stages of the development process. Each phase has a limited capacity for work at any one time. There is a prioritised requirements list from which a small work item is created; the list usually elaborates the requirements. This work item won’t be allowed to move on to the next lifecycle phase until some space opens up ahead.
Developers can control the number of active tasks at any one time, so they approach the project incrementally and have an opportunity to apply agile principles.
Work in Progress (WIP) Limits
While understanding the working of Kanban methodology, it is essential to know that these projects have WIP limits that specify the capacity of each work item. In this way, the development team focuses on a small amount of work at one time. Once a task is finished, only then the new one will be pulled into the cycle. WIP limits need to be upgraded by comparing the actual and expected effort for finished tasks.
Kanban Boards
Kanban boards make it easier for the teams to visualise their work and optimise the workflow among the team members. Like any other physical boards used by teams for projects, virtual boards are used for easy collaboration, accessibility from different locations, and traceability in agile software development.
Kanban Cards
In each kanban board, there are kanban cards that illustrate each work item separately. Kanban is a term of Japanese meaning “visual signal”. Using kanban cards, the team members can track the progress in a highly visual manner with the flow of work.
These cards contain critical information of a particular work item, showing the team members what needs to be done, who is in charge of it, how long would it take, and so on. It helps with the overall project management process and makes it efficient.
Benefits of Kanban Methodology in Agile Software Development
These days Kanban method is the most well-known methodologies exploited by agile teams due to its numerous benefits and throughput for teams of any size. Here are some of its most outstanding services:
● Planning Flexibility
By applying the kanban methodology, the team remains focused only on the tasks that are actively in progress. When a work item is concluded, they take the next work item from the top of the backlog and starts working on it. The product owner decides to prioritise the work items on backlog and reprioritise them without disrupting the team. When the prioritisation of the work items is done accurately, the team will provide continuous delivery for the project completion, which takes us to our next benefit of the Kanban method, continuous delivery.
● Continuous Delivery
It is the method of frequently delivering work to the clients. On the other hand, continuous integration is developing and analysing code gradually around the day. Together, they configure a CI/CD pipeline, helping the development teams (mostly DevOps teams) ship high-quality software in less time.
● Optimised Cycle time
Cycle time is a crucial aspect for kanban teams. It is the amount of time a work item takes to travel through the workflow from the start till it ships. With shortened cycle time, the kanban team can predict the completion of forthcoming work with surety.
● Fewer Bottlenecks
The more work items are piled up and done simultaneously, the more content switching occurs, becoming a barrier to project completion. Multitasking can reduce efficiency in the project management process. Work-in-progress limits in the kanban method highlight the bottlenecks and reserves piled up in the process because of the lack of skill sets, attention or team members. In this way, the kanban teams limit the work in progress to make the process more efficient.
● Visual Metrics
Another advantage of the kanban system is that it offers visual metrics for strong focus that ultimately improves the kanban team’s efficiency and effectiveness. This visualisation practice makes it easier for team members to spot any bottleneck or sprint backlog and remove it. In this agile method, the Kanban teams utilise control charts and cumulative flow diagrams to enhance the overall functionality.
Wrapping Up
The agile manifesto for software development has changed the way companies plan, design, test, and deliver software. Eliminating the traditional methods, agile product development methods are now accepted by almost all software companies. Kanban methodology is a widely used agile product development methodology, and it is replacing scrum due to its additional benefits and functionality.
Agile is undoubtedly the need of the hour when conventional methods of project development are not good enough. In the IT industry, the demand for agile professionals has expanded drastically in many management areas. The extreme demand for agile project management triggers the agile certifications need globally. Also, the fancy jargons like lean-agile, PMI-ACP make those overwhelmed interested in adopting agile principles and agile practices from the start.
In other words, agile certification is on every project manager’s wish list. The benefits of holding this certificate are countless. Whether you want to be a certified scrum master or interested in flexible project management methodologies, adopting the agile approach makes you a favourite choice for employers and potential clients. If you want to survive in today’s market, understanding how to implement the agile methods and understanding how it works helps you respond to the ever-changing corporate environment.
We have gathered all the information regarding prerequisites required for becoming agile certified, but before that, let’s understand what precisely agile certification is.
What is Agile Certification?
Those days are gone when Agile was just a part of employee training. Now, if you want to be a project management professional, you surely need certification in the domain of agile. Agile is now matured just like other domains, including service management and project management. Organizations, on the other hand, search for agile certification in the resume of candidates.
Many aspirants and agile professionals take this certification to get the various benefits when they switch their careers or job. Agile training offers the following benefits:
Better exposure
Lucrative salary
You are up to date with the current market trend
Better credibility
You’ll become an agile certified practitioner
Agile Certification Benefits
You’ve seen somebody becoming an agile coach, and now he/she is earning well. Is this what you are looking for from the agile certification course? If yes, you might not be thinking big. Apart from filling your pockets, this training course can help you in any area of your life with tons of benefits. Here’s how!
You are Increasing the Career Options
This training course is leading you towards continuous improvement, and you are widening your career options. We’ve discussed above; agile project professionals are in demand due to agile’s popularity. You can create new opportunities through this competitive international certification training along with the benefits for your management career.
Small Projects
Agile manifesto and agile framework both work on the intelligent approach. That’s why when you start a career in agile, you get the streamlined approach to tenable project management. What’s better than you are getting the real-world experience? You are focused on keeping things simple; you collaborate with the team members, regulate value delivery, and a high level of stakeholder engagement.
Grow your Capabilities
An agile project manager has the small project lifecycles with ease and can quickly respond to the shifting priorities. The reason is that agile offers you the tools that let you do more innovative tasks. Even project managers working for years shift from traditional approaches to agile project management to expand their qualities.
Eligibility Criteria
The eligibility criteria for the agile certification:
You must have a secondary degree.
Eight months in agile project management in the last three years before the application.
Training in agile practices for the period of 21 contact hours.
General project experience of 12 months within the last five years. (Note: Present PgMP or PMP also satisfies the requirement but not necessary for the PMI-ACP).
Steps of Agile Certification
The agile certification process varies between certifications and training providers. Here we are listing the most popular method adopted by various project management institutes.
The first step is to equip you with a strong understanding of the agile methodology and prepare to sit in the exam. Because of virtual classes nowadays, the agile certified course is available in the virtual courses or even in a self-led E-learning course.
Just like other project management certifications, the study period differs from person to person. Still, with the precise focus, you can be a part of the scrum alliance by sitting in the SCRUM study Agile Master Certified (SAMCTM) exam in a shorter time.
This certification exam is 120 minutes extensive, and on passing the exam, you will achieve the international Agile master Certified Qualification.
Top 4 Agile Certifications
PMI-ACP (Agile Certified Professional)
The PMI-ACP training course is the finest project management certification if you want to become an agile certified Practitioner. The Project Management Institute provides this training course. This PMI-ACP certification training is ideal for those project teams and professionals who want to or are using the agile methodologies. This certification authenticates and validates the people who have real-world experience executing agile projects.
The scrum alliance officially offers this agile scrum professional-level certification. This certificate demonstrates and recognizes the candidate’s ability in the advanced roles, antiques, advanced practices, and the Scrum framework procedures.
If you are working in a scrum and want to be called a certified scrum trainer, You can take this official course by Scrum.org. This training validates the candidates’ knowledge in the scrum and applies the Scrum framework and practices in real-world situations. This course is valuable for all scrum masters, scrum product owners, and scrum developers. You need to pass the exam of this training, and training course completion is upon you.
4. SAFe Scaled Agilists
Scaled Agilist or SAFe Agilists is a training course of official two days offered by the different training providers. The participants working in software development, business analysis, scrum, testing, and project management with five years of experience are the target audience of this course. The candidates will learn principles of lean-agile leadership from this course and learn how to launch SAFe agile in an organization.
Conclusion
As Rowan Bunning once said:
“The Agile movement in software is part of a larger movement towards more humane and dynamic workplaces in the 21st century”.
Over time, agile practices are getting encouragement from the IT sector and other sectors, and now recruiters are looking for agile principles in management positions. The decision is entirely up to you whether you want to upgrade yourself or stay there where you are sitting for the past two years. The good thing about agile certification is it’s offered officially by the Project Management Institute, inc globally, and you can take it anywhere.
Many stakeholders, leadership teams and management teams face this question when embarking on an agile transformation. By transformation, we mean a complete cultural change, a new operating model, an overhaul of previous ways of working, across the entire organization. Whilst Agile methodology was initially created to improve the efficiency of software development, it has now become a popular and effective operating model for an entire business.
The difference between traditional businesses andAgile organisationsis quite apparent. The first, noticeable difference is the ’agile manifesto’, which promotes continuous improvement, inspection, and adaptation. Compared to traditional organisations, Agile organizations can inspect, adapt and change. In short, they can embrace change management, fulfil changing customer demands (and ultimately gain customer satisfaction), understand real-world conditions and take full advantage of unpredictable markets.
Successful Agile transformation requires the buy-in of the entire organization. Agile values, agile principles and agile processes need to be accepted, adhered to and embraced by everyone from the top down, from leadership teams and management teams to development teams, project management teams and all team members in between. Instead of working in silos and hierarchies, agile teams work collaboratively and flexibly.
What are the key components of an agile transformation?
Prioritise people over processes
Fully functioning software over comprehensive documentation
Collaboration over contract negotiation
Ability to change over sticking to a plan.
What should management do before they start an agile transformation?
To successfully implement an agile transformation across an entire organization, rather than agile adoption in a single department, requires major changes.
Structural change – traditional hierarchies are out, replaced by self-organizing teams with the autonomy to respond to information. Agile leadership needs to be visible from the top down.
Process change – instead of the traditional project management approach of the waterfall method (working in one direction towards a set goal), Agile processes break projects into bitesize chunks (sprints). Agile practices include continuous improvements and regular, iterative releases rather than one final launch at the end of the project.
Cultural change – successful change management involves getting employee engagement in the process. The entire organization need to understand the benefits of agile, in order to change their working practices, behaviours and approaches. This aspect can be the most challenging part of Agile transformation and organizational change.
What type of management skills are needed to manage an agile transformation?
Leaders and managers need to shift from the traditional to a creative, agile mindset in order to adjust to the new way of working. This is not an easy thing to do. It requires a new focus, inner agility and reactive flexibility.
Creative thinking and exploration replace certainty and linear decision-making. Leaders need to encourage experimentation and risk-taking in product development and project management.
Collaboration is key. Leaders are no longer at the top of hierarchies with teams working in silos. Again, this can take a while to accept. Agile leadership teams need to trust team members to be self-organizing and to work autonomously.
Leaders and managers need to have effective communication skills to convey agile principles and cultural changes to their teams. This factor is important for all roles, especially the leadership team at the start of the transformation when an Agile mindset is at an early stage of the business roadmap. Subsequently, it’s vital for Scrum masters on a daily basis of implementation.
How to have a successful agile transformation through scaled agile?
Scaled Agile Framework says that conventional agile teams work best in teams of 5-11 members. Leaders need to build these small, diverse, nimble and collaborative teams in the first instance.
Lean scaled agile refers to translating the agile methods and implementing lean thinking such asKanbanand Scrum within the organisation on a broader level. Lean scaled agile requires several factors to contribute to the complete process including:
Role specialisation
Team size
Role of product owner
Iteration length
Role of user
Size of the batch
Definition of release
Definition of done/ Definition of reading.
Lean agile transformation for leaders, managers, and suppliers should be considered a large-scale transformation because of the involvement of cross-functional teams and the entire organization.
Any large-scale agile transformation should include:
The transformation scope should have a specific set of roles, including leadership, teams, management, suppliers and support teams.
A safe implementation roadmap including a timeline for a set of goals.
Lean and Agile basic building blocks and lean-agile methodologies combined with Kanban andScrum boards.
Solid and robust metrics reflect the whole transformation process, value delivery, continuous improvement, and maturity.
Lean scaled agile benefits
Improves management capacity
Capacity management is one of the agile ways and is usually known for balancing availability and workload. With the scaled agile approach, capacity management aligns with the ARTs, teams and has retrospective assessments every quarter. This helps create value while allowing for flexibility and change, empowering enterprise leaders to balance out and reflect regularly with minimum disruption and lead time.
Engages employees
Scaling agile offers in-built freedom and creates trust in the team and at individual levels. When it comes to decision-making, every individual decides how they will deliver the work and how their contributions impact the business’ overall goals.
Aligns work and strategy
With precise alignment between the top-level enterprise objectives and the employees, those involved will promote:
Encouraging transparency
Fostering quick response times
Enhancing agility
Cross-team coordination
Enables visibility in organisation-wide transparency
Agile leaders and agile coaches help scale lean-agile, visualise and connect work for every team while enabling enterprise-wide transparency. Through this visibility, everyone can see, clearly and consistently, how everyone works in the organisation.
In conclusion
Successfully transacting from the traditional management system to agile management is complex. This modern problem requires a modern solution such as lean scaled agile scaling. In short, the readiness of management remains the key factor in the successful agile transformation.
Organizations have one common goal, to deliver higher returns to shareholders. To achieve this, they need to keep up with evolving customer needs and preferences. They also need to satisfy changing employee expectations. In this case, an enterprise looking to scale up needs to move quickly and easily in response to internal or external threats, challenges, and changes in the overall market.
Surviving and thriving in the modern economy will require companies to adapt to the increasing developments in technology and market demands. For this to work, a company will have to seize opportunities and speed up its business process, which can be achieved by engaging and empowering its employees.
Enterprise Agility not only works for companies in the IT and software development industry, but agile organizations from other sectors can also draw inspiration from the core values and principles of agile.
Preparing for Enterprise Agility is the best solution for organisations looking to compete and win in today’s world successfully. It seems through an organisation’s operating model and identifying areas where value can be unlocked. The Agile transformation, though a significant undertaking, yields excellent benefits such as:
Productivity gains
Rapid decision-making
Reduced costs or Cost saving
Operational performance
Employee engagement
Better financial performance
Boosted customer satisfaction
What is Enterprise Agility?
Enterprise agility allows an organisation to adjust its forecasts and targets quickly and efficiently.
A few organisations have achieved full enterprise Agility. Most companies, depending on the competitive pressure they are facing, will pursue different outcomes. Some will aim to improve customer satisfaction, and others will try and develop employee engagement, while most of them will work towards reduced costs.
By applying Agile principles, small and large companies can identify and unlock value across the entire organisation. It is all about creating a new image for your company to productivity and more robust performance. To achieve and increase enterprise agility, companies need to change five dimensions in their operating-model, and these are:
Structure
People
Process
Technology
Strategy
Business Structure
Here, you will be dealing with the allocation of responsibilities and how workflows in your organisation. In terms of Structure, Preparing for Enterprise Agility demands that you develop a flexible network of empowered employees or teams.
Your team members or employees need to operate in one language, ensuring that they work together with high standards of expertise, transparency, and accountability. There should be a sense of proper alignment and collaboration throughout the entire organization that can benefit you across any potential market conditions.
The organisational structure should consist of a network of small cross-functional team levels of empowered employees with access to information, tools, and mechanisms to continue performing in a changing environment. Besides creating conducive work surroundings, companies can also empower individuals and teams by pushing decision-making downwards.
The quality of communication in an enterprise diminishes with the size of your employees. Your company’s strategic management goals should include breaking down your workforce into a collection of smaller teams (5-11 individuals).
As much as your employees need to be directed and managed, they will be highly engaged and deliver exceptional results if given clear responsibility and authority. This requires creating a working environment that allows them to be at their best. A high-trust environment attracts high-performing talent and enables individuals to achieve their full capabilities.
People
This dimension of your operating model focuses on your employee’s mindset. In the end, you should come up with a dynamic model that ignites passion in them. To positively influence employee engagement and satisfaction, you must focus on the three aspects of human motivation: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
Autonomy can be achieved by creating small, cross-functional teams. On the other hand, mastery involves the application of knowledge across a wide range of situations. Purpose can be achieved through Concrete tools such as goals, missions, key performance indicators and objectives, and key results (OKRs).
Most Companies have achieved enterprise agility by fostering an ownership mentality and real-time accountability in employees. You will need a workforce that sees your vision, mission, and goals the way you see them. The Employee mentality and company culture can affect the health of your organisation.
Individuals who believe that they are paid to work until five or when there is something in it for them do not run Agile organisation is not run by individuals. It requires a workforce that sees the bigger picture. Employees with an ownership mentality understand that they only win or get rewarded when the company thrives. This calls for a paradigm shift in the ways they think and behave.
Preparing Enterprise Agility is a project on its own. Therefore you will need to work with an Agile team. This cross-functional team usually comprises experts from various fields of work with broad and diverse skills.
Working with highly skilled professionals will ensure that the product development through to end product meets the customer’s expectations and preferences. For agility to take root in an enterprise, there is a need to adapt to change in behaviours and culture—both inside and outside the company. There is also a need for Employee Engagement and Inclusion to ensure that your operations run smoothly.
Transforming the workforce requires a need to address talent and leadership gaps. Going the agile way of changing your workforce requires the anticipation of critical skills that are of great importance in the future.
It is not only about work ethic, responsiveness, teamwork, and how you organise and control your employees. The idea is to create a cohesive community without having to force rules and processes down their throat. Employees should collaborate well across functions.
Process
This methodology involves transforming your business process to foster rapid decision-making and learning cycles. A company can assess its current operations management
Changing your workplace culture to achieve enterprise Agility requires that you do away with working practices that hinder adaptation. On the other hand, you need to embed working cultures that allow your company to change with the rapidly changing world.
For companies to start moving, they need to go beyond traditional transformation. Such organizations should fully embrace an agile mindset. The COVID-19 pandemic has made it easy for multiple organizations to achieve remote working. This sudden change has made them attractive to a diverse workforce, including the younger talent.
According to McKinsey, the health of an entire organization is determined by its management practices and outcomes. Agile companies score high in this type of performance metrics and measures.
Practices that blend well with the agile approach include:
Creating outcome-oriented job descriptions — focusing on outcome, customer impact and individual roles, and responsibilities
Investing in customer or user feedback loop— requires taking qualitative and quantitative customer research, conducting usability testing, analysing user behaviour, collecting user feedback, and running experiments to build superior user experience and design
Creating more generalist and fewer specialists—employee rotation to foster understanding of others’ roles. This helps in role clarity.
Merging Co-creation and Perfectionist mindset—focusing on craftsmanship and attention to detail while ensuring that customer needs are met.
Creating a more consensus-oriented work environment.
Reducing waste—allocating time and resources to activities that add customer value.
The most successful organisations fully understand that work is changing. With organizational agility, they also see the need for developing the workforce and maximising their full potential. This type of change should take place in a new environment, one that promotes the agile shift.
Therefore, preparing for Enterprise Agility to achieve business goals largely depend on how you redesign your workplace. There is also a need to integrate customers and other stakeholders into your operations management plan.
Technology
Technology can be a handy tool in achieving Enterprise Agility. It can transform your business process and systems to become faster, more convenient, and more efficient. It involves the integration of IT into the entire enterprise business model.
The advent of digital transformation and cloud technology has helped many businesses achieve flexibility and continuous improvement. Technological advancements that impact business management and operations management foster communication and interaction between employees, prospects, and customers.
Achieving enterprise agility requires that you analyse how trends impact the way work is done in your organisation. The Digital and Automation revolution should be used to foster simplicity, flexibility, and speed to respond to changes and challenges.
Besides operating models, organisations can also drive change that matters with data- and tech-enabled approaches. To remain competitive, there is a need to invest in innovation and technology to reduce operating costs and be up to date with market trends.
In a digital world, technology and innovation are best combined with operations management to boost an organisation’s performance. Companies can exploit digital capabilities by automating routine or repetitive tasks, creating room for productive human intervention. The digital solution applied in the management of operation frees more time, hence reducing unnecessary workloads.
Developing digital products and services is a way organization can achieve good customer experience and reducing costly manual processing. Redesigning the customer journey requires digitalising complex, manual processes to avoid wasting time for consumers, employees, and other stakeholders. Capturing the digital opportunity for operations management uncovers new ways for better performance.
Business Strategy
If you are planning for enterprise Agility, then you need to redefine your value proposition. A strategy should close the gap between the current business management trajectory and its aspirations. Reducing such traditional dependencies can help gain a competitive advantage for your team overall.
When it comes to strategy, the leadership team has a significant task of ensuring that all organisation members share a common purpose, vision, and decision; some call it the “North Star”. This enterprise Agility dimension involves senior and top-management teams, who are expected to meet regularly and create a strategy within the surrounding constraints.
Enterprise Agility requires restructuring your strategic management goals to one that aligns budget and values. It comes as a result of shaping your workplace culture to foster change and drive productivity. The strategic management process should aim to keep costs low with best practices while maintaining quality standards.
Senior-management teams need to develop strategies that can beat the competition. There is also a need to evolve how strategic decisions are made. It involves increasing more time for your strategy journey. For some companies, they may need to integrate their financial-planning processes with the strategic-management process.
Strategy development does not end with making decisions. The parties involved need to commit themselves to the new direction. Making directional changes requires installing a rigorous and ongoing strategic management process that can also resolve outstanding critical issues and, at the same time, respond to fundamental environmental changes.
Commitment and discipline are required when converting strategies into actions incorporated into the business management and operations management plans. The leadership team should spend as much time on building strategies as on operating the business.
When planning for Enterprise Agility, customer-centricity should be a priority. Customers should be placed at the core of your business. It entails providing a positive experience at every stage of the customer’s journey. Besides offering good support services, big brands are more focused on creating a culture around customers and their needs or preference.
Focusing on the customer requires collecting a wealth of data about them. Customer data should help you understand their interests, engagement, and buying behaviour. It would be best if you got an insight into what your customer needs and wants. There is also a need for a platform where customers can freely share their perspectives, views, opinions, and thoughts.
It is more about reading and responding to customer feedback, reviews, testimonials, or comments to gather more information for decision-making. Agile organisations rely on data obtained from the customer to employee communication networks or channels to identify problems as soon as they appear. There should also be a major shift in the organisation’s structure and culture for this to work.
Preparing for Enterprise Agility: Conclusion
Scaling a business aims to generate more revenue with low costs, but you may need Enterprise Agility to remain relevant in the market. Most organisations share the same goals, threats, and challenges; hence they all compete for limited opportunities and resources.
An agile organisation can respond fast to external forces making sure that business operations remain uninterrupted. The value of agility is captured by continuous experimentation and customisation. The conventional wisdom behind achieving Enterprise Agility is to improve the whole as supposed to the parts that link together business units and functions. An end-to-end operating model transformation enhances customer service, ensures continuous improvement, and increases capacity while reducing costs.
