Johannesburg, 26 Nov 2019
The enterprise business agility model is revolutionising how organisations drive business agility, which is crucial for staying competitive and relevant in markets that are changing faster than ever before and where customer experience needs to remain front and centre of any strategy.
This is according to Enterprise Business Agility Strategist and CEO of consulting firm Be Agile, Myles Hopkins, who says South African enterprises are relatively on par with their global counterparts in terms of agile enterprise transformation. This means that while market leaders are enthusiastically embracing the agile enterprise model in a bid to move faster and adapt to market changes, many tend to follow agile methodologies in pockets, without changing to an enterprise-wide agile mindset.
“I call this ‘doing agile’ instead of ‘being agile’. Many organisations are nowhere near as agile as they believe they are,” he says. “Many are still stuck on the technology aspect of agile, but an enterprise can only be as agile as its least agile department. This means key departments like HR and finance need to transform and enable agility across the organisation.”
Hopkins notes that the HR department is pivotal to the agile enterprise, as this is the department that must enable the organisation’s transformation by creating an environment conducive to change. “Any transformation is driven by people, therefore HR must become a key strategic player at the boardroom table. HR underpins transformation by creating an environment conducive to change; it needs to “unlearn” what it has done in the past in terms of organisation design, performance management, reward, career paths, learning, etc. If HR cannot provide the strategic support business needs to remain competitive, it will eventually become redundant and be replaced by automated technologies that handle day-to-day functions like payroll, with the strategic people practices critical to organisational success being handled elsewhere, or even outsourced,” he says.
Another department that must become agile is finance. Hopkins says: “I believe agile finance is the next hot topic in the business world, because you can’t have agile development held up by an inflexible budget cycle. Instead of annual budgets, we will start to see budgets that support agile product development. If projects have to be scrapped and new ones undertaken in line with changing market conditions, budgets have to be designed to support this in future.”
Business leaders can also be a stumbling block in the way of the agile enterprise, says Hopkins. “Leadership mindset can be a blind spot in an agile world – leaders need to change from ‘command and control’ to enabling leadership, in which they ensure employees have the culture, resources and knowledge necessary to do their jobs. This is not a traditional approach, particularly in South African businesses, where generally we hire the smartest people and then tell them what to do.” Hopkins notes, however, that it can be challenging for business leaders to understand how to change to become enabling ‘servant leaders’. It is imperative that organisations provide the psychological safety and support for leaders to make this transition.
To help local enterprises transform into agile enterprises, Business Agility South Africa will bring the first Business Agility Institute Conference in Africa to Johannesburg in February 2020. The conference, part of a global series of Business Agility Conferences, will feature local and international thought leaders and top executives, with keynotes delivered by renowned futurist Graeme Codrington, and the Dean and Director of Henley Business School, Jon Foster Pedley.
For more information about this event, please go to https://businessagility.institute/attend/business-agility-africa-03-04-february-2020-south-africa/
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