Agility Processes, Systems, and Tools

An organization’s processes, systems, and tools define how individuals and teams perform the work that they are assigned and thus, are specific to the type of work and the organization they are used within. The primary goal here is to support the workers such that they can perform high-quality work in an efficient and effective manner.

1. Process Agility

One key element of Process Agility is the focus on outcomes and products over outputs and projects. The governance of all decisions, processes, and work is directed towards ensuring the continuous delivery of value and business outcomes. This relationship could be described as: work must be justified based on the value it could deliver to a customer in the context of a business outcome. This enables decisions relating to the work to be entirely owned by the team.

All but the smallest of companies need common processes to ensure consistent outcomes in-line with the expectations of the organization, board, and customers. These are used to ensure that all parts of the organization make appropriate business and financial decisions, manage outputs, and control quality processes. Organizational problems occur when these processes conflict or lose sight of the customer (our purpose). There are many causes of this including; differing priorities, fear of failure, complex or overloaded governance controls, different management values, and principles, or just the historical layers of processes built upon one another from the complexities of running a complex organization.

Your goal is to create adaptable processes that align with customer value. So

• Map the Value Streams: Understanding your existing processes and the impact they have on productivity is the first step towards process agility. Value Stream Mapping (VSM) is a practice that is commonly overlooked when designing new processes.?
• Adopt Agile Methods: For technology organizations and software teams, it is likely that this step has already been achieved. Agile methods, such as Scrum, have been around for more than thirty years. The challenge here is to adopt agile methods outside of software teams.?
• Move to Audit Governance: In most organizations, it is easy to create a process but generally impossible to remove it. This leads to a highly complex mess of processes that are disproportionate to the work risk. Appropriate low-risk work practices should move from approval-based process governance to audit-based process governance.

Approval-based governance is a gate or a checkpoint. It says, “stop here, while we’ll check to make sure you can proceed”. This form of governance is appropriate in high-risk or high-cost environments, especially in situations where you cannot afford to fail.

Regular and automatic audit-based governance validates that you are doing both the right work and the work is being done right. It says, “keep going, and we’ll check in with you every couple of weeks”. This form of governance is appropriate in lower-risk or time-critical situations.

• Understand Process Control Loops: Process control loops, such as Deming’s Plan-Do-Study-Act (#PDSA ), the related Plan-Do-Check-Act (#PDCA ), #SixSigma’s Define-Measure-Analyse-Improve-Control (#DMAIC ) methods are cyclical processes to improve major decision making, through the rigorous testing of outcomes.

2. Agility System

Agility System is a cloud-based business process management solution. The solution contains a process mapping tool that enables users to create visualizations for operational activities. Users can create process maps and align processes with organizational roles and responsibilities. Key features include document management, records management, reporting, compliance management, and risk management. Agility System features a document management system that lets users capture, manage and share information. Documents can be accessed online or offline. Agility System also offers risk controls and compliance management tools. With the risk management module, users can design risk profiles for functions such as?finance, and operations. These risk profiles are then linked to process maps.

3. Agility Tools

If you go with the literal meaning of the word Agile, it means – “able to move quickly and easily”. The same meaning applies here when we talk about Agile in terms of project management or software development. Agile is a project management methodology, mainly used for software development, which is attributed to the division of a whole task into multiple smaller tasks and attaching them with the short & incremental phases of work known as sprints. The main intention behind this approach is rapid & early delivery, frequent reassessment & adaptive planning, continuous improvement, and flexible response to change.

Assuming that you have now got the basic idea of Agile, let’s move forward and explore Agile project management tools:

• monday.com : will help you with project management with features like reporting, Calendar, time tracking, planning, etc. It is suitable for any business size. More .
• ClickUp : is a cloud-based platform for process management, task management, and time management. With templates, it makes managing projects, people, resources, roadmaps, and docs easier. More .
• Wrike : is an online, agile, and real-time project management application that boosts communication among teams. Its simplicity and responsibility make the users achieve the results on time. More .
• Atlassian Jira :?is used primarily by software developers and is still best suited to that project model. The software supports a variety of workflows, including Scrum and Kanban. Users create roadmaps for projects, which gives you a visual method of tracking. You can manage each project with a drag-and-drop interface that lets you plan sprints and assign tasks to team members.?More .
• Asana : is an all-in-one cloud-based agile project management tool that helps you plan, organize, and track the progress of your projects and tasks. Asana comes with several agile features such as project timelines, project and task templates, Gantt charts, Kanban boards, sprint planning, bug tracking, roadmap planning, backlog management, and lots more. It also has a clean and user-friendly interface that offers drag-and-drop functionality. More .
• Trello : is a well-known agile project management tool that is based on the Kanban and Scrum framework to help you visualize and organize your workflow. It supports an intuitive and easy-to-use, drag-and-drop interface. Trello helps you assign, organize, and prioritize your tasks, and add descriptions to each task with a Trello card. It also lets you set deadlines and due dates, create checklists, and track your processes. What makes Trello unique is its robot called Butler, which automates processes using rule-based triggers, calendar commands, due date commands, and by creating a custom board and card buttons. More .
• Teamwork.com : is an easy-to-use, task management system. It is a tool that allows companies to maximize their project management processes. This tool also helps you to avoid unnecessary meetings and get things done quickly. More .
• Miro : is the online collaborative whiteboard platform that enables distributed teams to work effectively together, from brainstorming with digital sticky notes to planning and managing agile workflows. With Miro, you can take advantage of a full set of collaboration capabilities, make cross-functional teamwork effortless, and organize meetings and workshops: using video chat, presentation, sharing, and many other features. More .

The tools and processes that an organization uses must be aligned with the individuals/teams performing the work, as well as their overall capabilities, so go as light as possible while still being able to keep things under control.

In the context of agility, if your choice is to create a new procedure or train your people/teams, the better long-term investment will be in your people/teams.

So let's find out the Agility teams in the next article.

By Charifa OUHAGA .