Business Agility Vs Agile

Business Agility and Agile: You may have heard these terms before but what’s the difference between them? It turns out there’s quite a big difference and hopefully, we can clear that up a bit.

Agile

Agile is commonly associated with the Agile Manifesto written back in 2001, and more recently Modern Agile. It’s often linked with team delivery and is based upon 4 main values:

• Individuals & Interactions

• Working Software

• Customer Collaboration

• Responding To Change

Business Agility

Business Agility has taken agile concepts and principles and has elevated them to be applied across the entire enterprise. The Business Agility institute as well as the Enterprise Business Agility model are thought leaders of Business Agility.

Business Agility is a much bigger conversation and looks at making the entire enterprise flexible & nimble, not simply implementing new processes into teams. Business Agility implements a variety of modern ways of working, techniques are implemented against a number of pillars:

1. Customer Seat At The Table

Really involving the customer and being a customer-focused organisation. Amazon and Google attribute a lot of their success in giving the customer a voice during development conversations.

2. Lean Portfolio Management

Prioritising alignment and achievement of business outcomes. Techniques such as Objective & Key Results and Big Room Planning (BRP) sit under this pillar.

3. Organisational Structure & Design

One of the main failures of delivering business outcomes is for the ability for organisations to swarm around business problems. This means breaking down silo’s to deliver high-performing missions. In a changing business world, companies need to learn how to redesign themselves from the inside out.

4. Agile Framework & Mindset
Finding an Agile Framework or building one that fits you and ensuring the agile mindset is embraced & nurtured.

5. Leadership & Culture
Uplifting an organisation’s culture can yield 10x the business results, but the culture of a company starts at the top and feeds down. How do leaders need to behave and what do they need to know to encourage true transformation within their organisation?

6. Make It Stick/Sustain
Undertaking a Business Agility transformation is a big investment. So it’s important to make sure you don’t fall back into bad patterns and behaviours.

7. Technology Agility
The technology and processes used to enable your organisation’s effectiveness and efficiency.

8. Metrics
Benchmarking your teams and applying growth plans. You can learn more here: Measure

If you want to further discuss how you or your business can benefit from Business Agility and want to implement it Contact Us