Business Agility: rethinking performance in the context of Covid-19

Covid-19 has proven to have a strong economic impact. Tradicional companies and small businesses have been having their entire operation interrupted. Nevertheless, others are prospering even more. So, what is their advantage? How to measure and achieve it?

We could attribute this superiority to many factors, but certainly one of the most important is the Business Agility. 

Since "Business Agility" has become "sexy" and quite a buzzword, let's first clarify what it really means.  There is a lot of confusion about it. Some people believe implementing Scrum and Kanban boards in areas outside Technology, such as Marketing and HR turns a company into "Agile". The plain truth is: Business Agility is much broader than that.

If you remember the agile manifesto statement: "responding to change over following a plan" and the modern agile mindset "experiment and learn rapidly", you have now a snippet of information about what it means. The Business Dictionary says it is "the capability of a company to rapidly change or adapt in response to changes in the market." (...)

To make a long story short, when we talk about Business Agility, we are talking about how capable we are to change.

Especially in times of social isolation and remote work:

• How capable are we to keep the teams connected and engaged?
• Are we able to collaborate and co-create remotely?
• In what ways can we rethink the ways of working?
• To what extent are we ready to unlearn and learn?

And more than ever before:

• How capable are we to optimize processes continuously? Innovate?
• To what extent are we allowing experimentation and failure? 
• How can we use data to make/automate decisions?
• In what ways can we amaze so disputed customers?
• How capable are we to expand our network and ecosystems?

Finally, how can we measure all those factors? Remember:

"If you can't measure it, you can't improve it." (P. Drucker)

These are some of the most important questions to be answered. Striving in this new world requires us to care more, do more, do faster, and add more value.

Care more

We rely on our teams to make things happen. Since most of them have been working from home, a good home office experience is critical to achieving results. Physical distance doesn't mean being disconnected. Companies have to provide the right infrastructure and psychological support for their teams during this period of social isolation. 

A Remote Happiness metric based on the questions below can help:

1. Have you been provided with all the necessary tools to do your remote work?
2. Do you feel supported by your company, especially by their remote work policies?
3. Have you been trained for remote working, including new processes and tools?
4. Do you have one-on-one meetings with your leader? Do you feel supported by her/him during this quarantine?
5. Do you have easy and good communication with your team members?
6. Do you keep connected with colleagues through virtual happy hours or other remote social gatherings?
7. Do you feel supported at home and can manage your work-life balance?
8. Do you feel mentally and emotionally healthy to perform your daily activities?
9. Do you believe you have been being more productive than before?
10. Has the company inquired about your preferences after quarantine (preparing for the next normal)?

This is about caring. If they answer "yes" for most questions above, you are in the right way. Work to improve the areas of "no's" whilst searching to leverage all teams' experience. You can calculate it as the sum of responses, where "yes"=1, "partially"=0.5, and "no"=0.

Do more

Produce more, do more experiments, analyze more data, and serve more people. It is merely about quantity.

When we have ideas to improve our products/services, we need to test them and prove they are wrong as fast as we can. Yes! That's it! Let's suppose we have a backlog with hundreds of ideas. How can we make sure we are picking the right ones? The more ideas we test, the higher is the probability to come up with the best and most suitable solution. Besides that, the more hypotheses we validate, the faster we are going to learn from our blind spots. So, why not measure the number of experiments completed/validated and the number of customers' feedback we have implemented?

Additionally, provide a more customized experience to customers, more autonomous and self-service features, and more integrated channels for their communication.

Monitoring the customer base and its related KPIs is a part of any business dashboard, but is this information crystal clear for the development teams? If it is not, you should consider bridging the gap between business and IT. So, software engineers can understand better how their work impacts business results. It is a mindset shift from focusing on outputs to outcomes.  Team OKRs are an excellent mechanism for doing that.

Ideally, there should not be segregation between IT teams and business areas. As much as possible, engineers should understand the business, and the business people should understand about Technology. Shared goals are the way to connect and align them.

Increase the number of perspectives within your teams - and outside them. To boost the teams' creativity and innovate you need to encourage distinct and discordant points of view. Diversity is extremely valuable here, and the divergent thinking enriches a completely new and unexpected solution. 

Start measuring diversity (gender balance, age, background, female leadership) and inclusion (sense of belonging) in your teams. As once I heard,

"Diversity is like inviting everybody to the party, while inclusion is when they feel comfortable enough to dance".

People who think the same will add nothing new. People who feel they don't belong will not face and dig into productive conflicts.

Companies should think about scalable solutions and infrastructure elasticity. The more people we are prepared to reach and serve, the more people will benefit from it. This is the main concept behind business models based on digital platforms. 

Last but not least, consider measuring the quantity of software being delivered by your development teams. By using the lean metric throughput, you can measure the average of user stories/features delivered in a certain period of time.

Do faster 

I am stating the obvious, but do stuff as quickly as you can do it. In this fast-paced and volatile scenario, the faster we can produce software, the quicker we will provide value to customers. 

We cannot afford not measuring - and decreasing - our lead time. If you are not familiar with the concept, consider it as the time it takes to deliver value to the customers. It can be measured considering the time between your acceptance of an order until it is delivered to your customer. 

For example, when you order a pizza in your food app, lead time starts when the restaurant accepts your order and ends when the pizza is delivered to your door. The same works for software development. It can be considered the lead time, the moment that your team accepts a story to be pulled into a sprint, until the moment it is indeed delivered into the production and is ready for customers’ use.

In order to reduce your lead time - and delivery time - you may also consider improving your cycle time, or the time you take to produce something - prepare a pizza or build a user story. By eliminating waiting times and handovers; automating all the steps as possible; we can significantly decrease the time to produce something and deliver it. 

Moreover, consider measuring the number of deployments into production (or deployment frequency). This is only possible due to DevOps implementation practices. Having the code completed, features will be available to thousands of people a few seconds later. This is not a luxury anymore, it's a must-have.  It's about time to market and market responsiveness.

In a nutshell, if your software development process is agile but you are not agile to deliver it to customers, then your company is not agile. 

Add more value 

Fit-for-purpose. In other words, do what is meant to do to provide value. 

The central mindset for an agile business is to be customer-centric. If you produce more and faster, but you are not delivering value to your market niche, you'll not have a sustainable and profitable business. 

What shall we measure and be obsessed with? CSAT (Customer Satisfaction), NPS (Net Promoter Score), Churn, Reviews, Contact Rate, and so many more. Some are very specific for each industry and segment. My emphasis, though, is to make this information disseminated to the software engineers.

Besides that, everybody has customers, being that external or internal. If you provide service for an area in your organization, why not create your own NPS survey? I have been applying this for Agile Coaches teams over the past years and I can say it works perfectly to improve our services and to be aligned with customer’s needs. Always ask for your customers' feedback.

Finally, understand that "Agile" is a journey, not a destination. I know it is a cliché but there is no such project to become agile - with a deadline. Continuous improvement is the keyword.

Be mindful, however, that value is something dynamic. What is considered the value today might not be the value for tomorrow.

The changes the coronavirus pandemic has made to our lives are the greatest proof of that!

The ability to unlearn and learn is also key to an agile business. Giving up on beliefs and ways of doing things can be important; and opening up to novelty, new possibilities, and experimentation is compulsory. Nonetheless, changing the leadership to the growth mindset is still one of the most difficult parts of the transformation and should be a priority.

To maximize value for the company, improve your current processes and ways of working. Be obsessed with kaizens (evolutionary and continuous improvement). Measure how much a process costs before and after you implement kaizens and its related savings. 

Furthermore, what is the mission of each one of your teams? What type of value do they deliver? For whom? Most leaders focus only on how much the IT operation costs. This is a mistake. Measure teams' productivity in terms of business results but never using the number of story points delivered or working hours. Do not make a mistake by calculating feature costs, instead, focus on the feature outcomes.

Therefore, if your team has been deploying a bunch of features but not helping to bring more customers/revenue or reducing operational costs, you are doing it wrong. 

In conclusion, to make more from what you have during the coronavirus outbreak, invest more in knowledge sharing, collaboration, and co-creation; experiment with new tools and technologies; promote an awesome culture for your teams. Offer them the appropriate support,  trust them to do their jobs, and allow them to do their best. In a favorable environment, they always do. :)