Part 2: The Complete Guide to Business Agility as a Driver for Innovation

Why Business Agility is More Relevant than Isolated Agile Practices?

Agility promotes flexibility, collaboration and?continuous improvement. It’s about adapting and responding quickly to changes. And this is what makes it suitable to increase the pace of innovation. Of course, easier said than done.

We have seen in the past twenty years how agile has outgrown its software development box. The problem is that most organizations that want to be agile are trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. This leads to frustrations especially on the receiving end, when employees are forced into these “agile ways” even though leadership did not set the stage for agile in the first place.

Instead of fixating on agile methods, the focus should be on how to scale the approach at a higher level through?business, organizational and enterprise agility.?They might seem one and the same thing, but there are nuances that differentiate the three. ?? While?business agility?focuses on operational responsiveness,?organizational agility?emphasizes cultural and structural adaptability, and?enterprise agility?encompasses a broader perspective, incorporating external relationships and ecosystem dynamics in addition to internal capabilities. ?

In all three scenarios, achieving an extensive agile transformation is a highly complex journey and requires a top-down approach. However, it doesn’t mean that agility can’t also be achieved bottom-up, outside the IT department. In our?work with customers, we see many innovation champions who put the wheels in motion through their determination and commitment to embrace agility. ?

Even though the agile concept is used as a badge of honor by many organizations, it’s still highly misunderstood. ?

That's why it’s also important to understand not just?what agile is, but also what is not. ?

What is NOT Agile??

Most commonly, organizations fail to scale agile practices because they rush to methodologies and frameworks without knowing why they want to be agile in the first place. ?

Using Kanban, organizing Sprints, and hiring Scrum Masters will not automatically make you more agile. It’s important to understand agile holistically and put it into context before getting to the actual tactics and tools.

Start by asking yourself,?what do you want to achieve, and what problems you want to solve with agile?

If your goal is to increase efficiency, deliver more or faster, increase productivity, or quality, there are plenty of other methods that can help you achieve this. Agile can contribute to them, but it’s not a prerequisite. ?

The main goal of looking into business agility should be market responsiveness: your organization’s ability to adapt rapidly to changes that are happening in the market. Agility is primarily about adaptability and changing conditions. ?

Without clearly understanding the above, it’s easy to see how, for many organizations, agile became synonymous with processes like scrum.

Just to give a bit of context,?Scrum?is the most popular method (even though it precedes the Agile manifesto) used now by agile practitioners. It’s an iterative framework that brings small teams together to find adaptive solutions for complex problems. ?

A scrum process is built around product innovation and works best when there is a lot of uncertainty, and you don’t know which way your product should go.

In Scrum, work is organized into short iterations called sprints, usually lasting 2-4 weeks, during which a cross-functional team works to complete a set of tasks or goals. Sprints have been adopted by other departments too, not just those working on product development. ?

But whether these can be successfully implemented outside of software development and scaled to other departments, is still a matter of debate. We’ll explore the reasons behind this in the next section where we dissect the challenges and pitfalls of agile. ? ?

Bottom line, scrum is most suited for exploration and validation of assumptions.?Scrum is not about speed, efficiency, and predictability.?If you’re in a highly exploratory environment Scrum is a valuable practice.

Then there are those teams that proclaim their agility through Kanban. We explained the tool in greater detail?here, where we show how it’s used to improve flow efficiency and optimize operations.

While it can be a highly valuable tool within the agile transformation,?Kanban on its own is not enough to increase agility. ?

Now, what does this all have to do with innovation management and how can you actually drive agility to innovate? ?

Next week, in Part 3 of this limited series on Agile Innovation Management we'll see how agility enables innovation. Stay tuned!

If you're eager to read all in one go, the full article is available on Viima's blog.