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What’s keeping you from business agility?

A look at the factors keeping organisations on their current, cautious path and away from remaining competitive and delivering customer value.
Andrea Lodolo
By Andrea Lodolo, CTO at CA Southern Africa.
Johannesburg, 24 May 2019
Andrea Lodolo is chief technology officer of CA Southern Africa.
Andrea Lodolo is chief technology officer of CA Southern Africa.

It’s hard to respond successfully to new opportunities proposed by the business when it isn't delivering on the current strategy.

Let’s set a scene that may sound all too familiar:

• Your technology organisation isn’t executing on time or on budget because it’s overwhelmed by changing priorities and too many requests for the same resources.

• You, the CIO, are spending a good deal of time maintaining legacy code to keep systems up and running.

• Worse, good people are leaving the company because they’d rather innovate and work on new technologies than legacy code.

• Five years wouldn’t be nearly enough time to deliver on the backlog of customer requests. In fact, you probably don’t have visibility into just how many requests there are.

Compliance and audit mandates are a major concern and drive your aversion to risk. Before you can make any investment, you have to endure the delays created by lengthy planning and budgeting processes. Factors like these keep the organisation on its current, cautious path; away from remaining competitive and delivering customer value.

So what’s the bottom line? The answer is: you cannot respond effectively.

To understand this, you need to examine the possibility that you could, in fact, be your own major barrier to achieving business agility. But the reality is that you are also an executive sponsor and leader who’s key to achieving it.

You will need to find the courage to create change, to start building trust and agility throughout the organisation. And sustaining this change means adopting a different mindset, one based on lean thinking and far different from the siloed, political, command-and-control world in which you are more used to living.

These are the shifts in attitude needed to achieve true business agility, creating and sustaining the organisational health that helps you embrace change as part of everyday business. The bad news is that you don’t change mindset just by deciding to do so. The only way to get there is through intentional organisational, process and leadership shifts that continuously reinforce the new way of thinking.

The next goal: lean thinking

Lean thinking balances the need for flow efficiency, which is delivery of customer value, with resource efficiency; ie, use of people’s time and other resources. Note that lean thinking can appear to emphasise flow efficiency instead of a balance of efficiencies because 20th century business systems were designed to primarily emphasise resource efficiency.

By now you may be, or rather should be, asking: what is the cost of delay?

The following is an outline of what you can lose by waiting:

• 10% cost savings in the next year.

• 10% better quality, 10% fewer customer impacting incidents.

• 10% better visibility into risks and compliance gaps.

• 10% more engaged employees, 10% less churn.

• 10% more innovation budget to explore new market opportunities.

• 10% improvement in time to revenue.

• 10% more predictability for the entire organisation.

• 10% faster response time to emerging business needs.

According to Josh Linkner, author of the Road to Reinvention: “Someone or something is going to disrupt your business. It might as well be you.”

Getting started is difficult but by embracing lean thinking you are moving in the right direction.

Next on the menu is portfolio agility, which is described as the bridge between strategy and successful initiative execution. To be agile at the portfolio layer, businesses optimise for the highest-value initiatives, reduce WiP bottlenecks, incrementally adjust funding, and reduce the amount of time spent doing analysis and estimates.

Value stream agility includes all of the activities, materials, people and information that must flow and come together to provide customers with the value they want, when and how, they want it.

Getting started is difficult but by embracing lean thinking you are moving in the right direction.

Andrea Lodolo

Remember, agile started as a software movement based on learnings from lean manufacturing, and grew from an emphasis on a single, cross-functional team to enterprise-scale agile, which can be applied across tens to hundreds of cross-functional teams delivering value based on a shared, prioritised backlog.

It is a methodology that businesses use to deliver customer value faster. It involves changing organisational structure, processes, ceremonies and culture to be customer-centric and transparent, and emphasises continual improvement as well as operating at a faster cadence.

The goal is to achieve business agility, which is an enterprise’s ability to sense and respond to change quickly and confidently, and as a matter of everyday business.

By now your head is possibly spinning with the various aspects of agile but all will be revealed in my final Industry Insight in this three-part series, when I will outline five clear steps to achieving an agile business.

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