Digital technology makes everything easier. By digitising, automating, moving your operation to the cloud and putting your data to productive use, you automatically improve your service and your efficiency. Right? Most organisations have figured it out by now: reality is stubborn. Technology has long since ceased to be the bottleneck, but organisations continue to lag behind. With Business Agility, you work on agility. Not just in IT, but in your entire organisation.

How do you see that your organisation has stalled and is no longer innovating? The competitive advantage you had is evaporating, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to stay relevant in your market, your performance is lagging while your costs are rising, your talent is leaving and/or attracting new talent is difficult. Not to mention how you’re going to fit the AI revolution into your current model.

These are symptoms whose cause is often sought in processes and digitalisation. But often the cause lies deeper, in the way you organise your work.

From projects to products

Take projects and programs, for example. In government and in most large companies, starting a project is the standard response to a problem. This may be the “proven approach,” but the result is often that within your organisation hundreds of projects are running simultaneously. Managing and staffing this separate project and program organisation pulls a lot of people and budget away from the processes that should deliver customer and business value. Many projects also do not deliver the desired results.

It is much more efficient and effective to accommodate change and improvement by default in the process itself. To do this, you design your organisation adaptively and give the people in the process itself the autonomy and resources to improve their own work and results. An important aspect of this is that you link your operation back to your strategy. Because that linkage, in many companies and governments, has become very fuzzy over the years. It is extremely inefficient to set up projects to improve processes on the one hand, while on the other hand people in the primary process wonder: what value are we actually delivering here?

Business Agility: what it is and how it helps you

To get the connection between strategy and operations right again, when realising Business Agility, we follow a path that always starts with strategy. From that strategy, we look at the products and services that fit it, the organisational structure and the desired culture. We call this process organisation design.

In this way, you avoid trying to implement strategic and cultural changes in an organisational structure that is not suitable for them. This is the main reason that transformations and culture changes produce so much frustration and so few results. Business Agility means that your organisation can adapt and improve quickly. This involves your entire organisation and very explicitly not just IT. Because business and IT must work together seamlessly in an adaptive organisation.

Frustrated employees

It is important not to confuse Business Agility with agile working. Because agile has brought us a lot and works for building software many times better than the waterfall model that was dominant before. However, in many cases it is still seen as an IT and process-oriented approach. An approach, moreover, that is not without its challenges. Because if you try to scale agile across an organisation, you run into even more challenges. If you apply a framework like Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) for this purpose, you soon find out that it still requires a lot of coordination and management. Moreover, if you implement such a model without first thinking carefully about what it will give you, you will never get rid of it and you will still not be agile enough.

Your people within such a framework are also often frustrated, because they can spend far too little of their time building really valuable things for users. Much of their day is spent updating systems like Jira, doing repetitive work and having meetings. While the “real work” remains. For a highly skilled, technical person, the workday then quickly feels pointless and demotivating. Besides, a new job is easy to find.

Business Agility thus also aims to give employees back their autonomy and their mandate. Enabling them to use their capabilities to the fullest, to share their knowledge and contribute to the big picture, in productive collaboration with the business.

Retaining talent

Such synergy between business and IT can only be achieved if your people are intrinsically motivated to do the right thing for your customers or users. This is precisely why it is so important to have a crystal-clear connection between your organisation’s mission and the work people do on the shop floor every day. This gives them purpose, one of the three crucial pillars of motivation, according to author Daniel Pink. By letting them decide for themselves how they organise their work – autonomy – and by letting them acquire new skills every day, at their own pace and on their own initiative – mastery – with organisation design you shift the focus from temporary projects in hierarchical structures to the continuous delivery of value in an organisation that is built to be agile in dealing with customer and market challenges.

After all, your employees themselves know what to deliver, to whom and why. As a result, everyone also makes better choices and you waste less time and budget on overhead and peripheral issues. Because many responsibilities are decentralised, your organisation becomes leaner and less hierarchical. So you deliver value faster and use your employees’ talents more effectively.

Kevin Romijn, Business Agility Advisory Lead Rapid Circle