Gone are the days when an organization would face a known challenge that had a tailor-made solution. Advanced and evolving technologies, changing customers preferences, and a rapidly evolving competitive environment pose new kinds of problems and challenges every day. To thrive in such an ever-changing environment, an organization must possess the ability to adapt accordingly. Primary amongst the responses is creating an environment that allows innovation and leadership can help your organization increase its speed and productivity, empower its employees, respond better to customer needs and adapt to the changing marketplace.
How can your organization achieve something like this? The answer is enterprise agility. This article will learn what enterprise agility is, why it is essential, how to implement and the frameworks available for the same, measure agility, and more.
Table of Contents
What is enterprise agility?
Enterprise agility can be defined as an organization’s ability to quickly adapt to the changes in the business environment and the market demands. The organization can learn and grow when faced with ambiguous situations, foreseen and unforeseen circumstances, complex problems, dilemmas, and even during crises. An agile organization knows when to seize opportunities. It comprises highly skilled, knowledgable, innovative, and creative people.
An agile organization possesses the following features:
- Adaptability – When faced with sudden external or internal changes, your organization can quickly assemble its resources and technology to have a coordinated response.
- Flexibility – Your organization is flexible enough to reshape its core business and cultural objectives to the changing circumstances by ensuring equal participation and contribution by its employees.
- Balance – Your organization strikes a balance among its core activities even though it has acquired new capabilities and resources. It maintains the control and autonomy of the organization’s infrastructure.
Why is enterprise agility necessary?
An agile organization adapts to the technological and industry changes without affecting the speed, scalability, productivity, performance, quality, and quantity of its products and services. Let us see more of such benefits of implementing enterprise agility.
- Enterprise agility helps increase business value creation. Your entire organization can focus on the top priorities and objectives to deliver value rapidly.
- Agile organizations value both internal and external feedback. With rapid feedback, your organization meets customer needs and can exceed their expectations.
- Enterprise agility creates a positive culture of teamwork, honesty, transparency, trust, cooperation, and collaboration in your organization.
- Your organization can outperform your competition as it is equipped to respond at the right time to the changes in the business environment.
- With enterprise agility, your organization can easily align its products and services to the changes in customer’s demands and achieve customer satisfaction.
- To meet the customer needs, your organization knows how to determine the right technology and delivery methods.
- Enterprise agility allows your organization to analyze the current agile and DevOps practices and make plans for the necessary improvements.
- Your organization knows how to leverage its existing capabilities to grow further and deliver better results.
- Enterprise agility increases your organizations’ financial and operational performance through increased employee engagement and customer satisfaction.
- Increase your organization’s speed of delivery of its products and services while increasing their quality too.
How is enterprise agility implemented?
From the previous articles, you know that you must take specific steps and approaches to implement agile. But here, we are not talking about implementing agile in a few teams but an entire organization. Follow these steps to implement enterprise agility:
1. Introduce agile – Yes, the first step would be to introduce Agile to all the leaders at all levels in your organization. They must understand what Agile is and its importance. Train your project managers, team leaders, executives, software developers, testers, consultants, and others in the agile methodologies.
2. Analyse your organization and the available resources – Analyse your organization’s readiness and available analytical tools and resources. Identify the small-scale projects that can be your starting point. Identify the right leaders who are capable of handling agile transformation.
3. Start small and scale – Start with the priority projects and scale them to a suitable level. Use established Agile methodology or frameworks like Scrum or Kanban to start the journey. With their successful completion, other projects and teams will begin embracing agile. But it would be best if you remembered that every project is different and don’t hurry to implement the same approach to all the projects. Take time to understand each project and implement the necessary agile methodologies. Take the help of agile coaches.
4. Apply a framework – There are many enterprise agility frameworks. The most known ones include Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD), and Large Scale Scrum (LeSS). Each framework has its advantages and disadvantages when it comes to Organizational Agility. Conduct necessary research on them along with analyzing your organization’s infrastructure before deciding on a framework. Make sure that you have chosen the right one for your organization.
Which enterprise agility frameworks are available?
An enterprise or organization would be globally distributed across various geographical locations. With hundreds of teams, they implement different agile principles as they are applied at the team level.
An enterprise agility framework provides Agile operating models that scale the agile principles to the other layers of the organization beyond agile teams. The framework aims to combine all projects and teams for better collaboration and coordination. Let us see some of the available enterprise agility frameworks to help bring Agile transformation across the organization.
Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
First published in 2011, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) implements agile at the enterprise level using lean development principles. SAFe addresses your organization’s infrastructure and prescribes how your organization can operate from ideation to development and delivery. SAFe is scalable, modular, flexible and ensures synchronization and collaboration of all the teams in the organization. With SAFe, you can effectively address the challenge of scaling from a single unit to multiple teams at the enterprise level.
Disciplined Agile (DA)
Introduced in 2012, Disciplined Agile (DAD) is a people-first and learning-oriented process decision toolkit. It provides the goal-oriented approach to the organizational challenges while still offering the flexibility of frameworks and practices (Way of Working – WoW) for each team.
With DA, teams can choose an appropriate life-cycle or framework, including Scrum, Kanban, or Lean, depending on their context. The scalability perspective also addresses the DevOps, Values Stream, and Disciplined Agile Enterprise (DAE) aspects beyond the team-specific practices. These dimensions of flexibility and enterprise awareness provide an excellent foundation to scale your agile initiatives.
Large Scale Scrum (LeSS Huge)
Founded in 2005, Large Scale Scrum (LeSS Huge) is a scrum framework that scales scrum in multiple teams working on a single project. LeSS supports multi-located teams and insists that the planning is minimal with fewer rules, guides, and roles. LeSS encourages experimentation and feedback at the primary level before scaling up. It enables backlog sharing, collaboration, and planning across multiple teams.
Apart from the above enterprise agility frameworks, other frameworks include Spotify, Nexus, Scrum@Scale (S@S), and Scrum Lean in Motion (Slim).
How to measure business agility? What metrics are helpful?
How do you know if your organization has achieved success in implementing agile or not? By measuring the agility of your business. One way is to know if your organization has the following traits of an agile company:
- Putting the customer first and every employee abides by this mission.
- Your teams focus on the outcomes and results rather than the amount of work they have done.
- Your organization is always open to upgrade to next-generation technology and invests in new tools.
- Your employees are not afraid to make decisions or take risks. They have a culture of always learning, experimenting, improving, and growing.
- You hire new employees based on their ability to thrive in an agile culture.
Having these traits is not enough. You can use some of the following metrics and KPIs (Key Performace Indicators) against which you can measure the agility of your teams. The following metrics help measure the performance of individual scrum teams that deliver the product increment.
- Sprint burndown report – Tracks the completion of the various tasks during a sprint.
- Velocity report – Various iterations of the average work done by a team in a sprint.
- Epic and release burndown – Tracks the progress of epics and versions of the work during a sprint.
- Control chart – Tracks the status, time duration, and cycle of the tasks.
- Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD) – Measures the state of the issues and the time duration.
- Lead Time – Measures the period between the request and the actual delivery of a product.
- Net Promoter Score – Measures your customer willingness to recommend your product or services to others.
- Work Item Age – Tracks the aging, i.e., the time between start and completion of current tasks.
- Throughput – Measures average tasks processed in a time unit, indicating a team’s productivity level.
- Flow Efficiency – Tracks the distribution between actual work and the waiting periods.
- Code Coverage – Measures the number of lines or blocks of code that are executed while testing.
A few other types of metrics can also help you define and measure parameters of organizational agility. The Goal Question Metric (GQM) and Objectives and Key Results (OKR) are two such metrics that enable businesses to measure the progress of their agile enterprise initiative goals.
What Is Goal Question Metrics (GQM)?
GQM allows businesses to focus on their context and specific goals. Once the goals are set, you can define the questions you want answered to judge the progress. Then you collect the data that provides answers to these questions.
The collected data then allows the businesses to ascertain how far they have achieved their goals.
What Are Objectives And Key Results (OKR)?
OKR metrics are again robust for measuring the progress and defining the roadmap to achieve the set objectives. The business can specify what they want to achieve and the set of key results to help you achieve the goals. You can then measure the progress against the achievement of these critical results.
Conclusion
We live in a competitive world. To keep up with the rat race, an organization needs to outperform its competition. It is not enough if the development teams are agile. You must adopt the agile mindset, values, principles, and practices at the enterprise level. While it is not an easy task by any means, the benefits far outweigh the efforts. Fortunately, there is enough help available, be it in the form of the frameworks for scaling agile practices at the enterprise level or the guidance from coaches and professionals who have helped many organizations like you transform.
Featured Image: Photo by Isaac Smith on Unsplash
