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Building Blocks of Organizational Agility

Building Blocks of Organizational Agility

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"Organizational maturity is not just about technical excellence or process efficiency but also business effectiveness Agility innovation intelligence and people centricity"

Organizational Agility is the ability of a company to set themselves or change according to the changes in the market. In this century almost every company has adopted this method for the continuous growth of the organization. It has been noticed that the organization which lacks Agility, their employees are often distracted, less engaged, and non-cooperative, and decisions making processes are often tedious. This requires a more Agile approach, which in turn creates a long-lasting and positive impact on the entire enterprise.

The SAFe approaches this challenge of digital transformation through the “dual operating system”. By organizing the enterprise around the flow of value, organizations are able to focus on both the innovation and the growth of new ideas.

Building blocks to Organizational Agility 

Looking at organizational Agility, we have been able to pinpoint and narrow down some building blot differentiate between truly Agile organizations and their peers. 

If you think very broadly about these building blocks, they can be looked at under three clusters:

1. How the organization thinks and works

When we look at really Agile organizations there are two ways in which those organizations differentiate themselves from others:

  • One is that they have better approaches to gathering, synthesizing, and making sense of a lot of external information and data. There is usually never a shortage of information in any organization about what's going on in the market. The main thing is how you synthesize it. A more Agile organization is better able to read the signs and make decisions effectively.

  • Based on this, the second way in which they differentiate themselves from others is that they think there is a real focus on the enterprise-wide thinking whereas in many of their peer organizations we see a lot of siloed that's focused on products or specific marketing segments or regions. 

In an Agile organization, you see people thinking and taking decisions across the board on a very enterprise-wide rather than in a narrow area. 

2. The internal environment that the organization creates and the workspace.

Moving on to the second area of discussion, we think about the internal environment and how they differ. So when we go into a very Agile organization, we see several things. First of all, we noticed that leaders can grapple with the tightrope of creativity and clarity for people while accepting a level of ambiguity. Every organization is facing a huge amount of ambiguity but some leaders within that try to create so much clarity that they ignore the ambiguity or are completely overwhelmed by the ambiguity and fail to create clarity.

Most Agile leaders can walk that tightrope.  Secondly, there's a very strong focus on performance and by performance what we see is a focus on the outcome not on more traditional input measures which often hold an organization back.

Thirdly we see real recognition and reward of flexibility and innovation and fin, ally internally there is often more Agile organization, a culture that rehabilitates Agility very well. So we all are agreed that more traditional hierarchical command and control styles of leadership are not evident but rather a much more flexible environment that is open to new approaches to change and to innovate as well. 

3. Decisions made and actions taken by the organization

The final area we see as being key differentiation for Agile organizations is in how they make decisions and how they take actions. One thing we see is that there's a huge focus on simplicity. Many organizations are overwhelmed by complexity but what we see in Agile organizations is they strip away a lot of that complexity, focusing on the few things that make the biggest difference.

Finally, the decision-making processes. It's incredibly important that the organizations bring all the various components that need to be considered in decision making but they don't let these bow them down. What they do is that they have processes of bringing it together, they can synthesize, make a decision, stay with that decision and act on it and this again makes a huge difference to more Agile organizations.

Benefits of Organizational Agility

Every time companies use different approaches to get the maximum benefits from organizational Agility. One of the best examples is Netflix. Yes, today's largest online streaming platform. Do you think it was successful from the beginning? No, it is just because of the policy they offered to the customer and the business philosophy they believe in. Organizational Agility turned Netflix into the most popular streaming platform, leading to much success and making its owners billionaires. Some of such  benefits of organizational Agility are listed below:

  1. With the tremendous increase in knowledge and distribution, it is helpful in multidimensional communication and complex collaboration with customers.

  2. This results in high organizational health and makes them stronger in motivation 

  3. It gives the ability to adapt to change and efficiently work with several teams.

  4. Minimize the risks of failure by turning it to learn something new as an experience. 

  5. It helps the organization to stand in the competition, understand increasing customer needs, and accept the change

  6. Acts as a satisfactory element by presenting the best possible product

  7. It simplifies the task by providing a clear vision. 

  8. It provides the team, with the capability to cope with complexity.

Cons of ignoring organizational Agility

Change is inevitable. We all fear to change a lot. But avoiding change and adaptation can cost a lot. Around the globe, there are thousands of companies that struggle with organizational Agility. We are today living in a constantly changing business environment in which Agile has taken an important part. If we ignore it, then we are not able to enjoy the numerous benefits it provides. Some of them are listed below:

  1. With the tremendous increase in knowledge and distribution, it is helpful in multidimensional communication and complex collaboration with customers.

  2. This results in high organizational health and makes them stronger at motivation 

  3. It gives the ability to adapt to change and efficiently work with several teams.

  4. Minimize the risks of failure by turning it to learn something new as an experience. 

  5. It helps the organization to stand in the competition, understand increasing customer needs, and accept the change

  6. Acts as a satisfactory element by presenting the best possible product

  7. It simplifies the task by providing a clear vision. 

  8. It provides the team, with the capability to cope with complexity.  

 

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Conclusion:

" I concluded long ago that limits to innovation have less to do with technology or creativity than organizational Agility".

                                        -Ray Stata

From the above-mentioned and detailed paragraphs, we can now agree on how important organizational Agile is for business growth and development. To react to changes fast, we do need Organizational Agility. By adopting the right mindset and by hiring the right people we can truly welcome better results. Right Balance in a company's workforce is necessary and proper investment in human resources is the only way. No matter what your job is, it's very important to understand and know the industry you are working in. In the case of Agility, to gain much success you need to know about the industry. To implement new strategies, to evolve and address emerging opportunities, the only weapon helpful is organizational Agility.

References: 

https://www.scaledAgileframework.com/organizational-Agility/

https://www.getcloudapp.com/blog/organizational-Agility/

https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/the-organization-blog/the-drawbacks-of-Agility

 

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