What is business agility?

It is common for the market to confuse business agility with speed in getting things done. We often find agility in software development teams.

But is agility confined to software development alone? We believe that business agility must encompass the company as a whole.

An agile company is one focused on the customer and establishes processes, practices and culture so that this actually occurs and that it is also adaptable to what the customer wants.

Therefore, the company must focus only on what brings value to the customer. What does not add value to the customer should be discarded, unless activities that do not add value directly to the customer but are necessary, legal activities for example.

Some principles and instruments to make a company agile are:

• Create a customer-focused business culture.

• Focus on deliveries on an ongoing basis to generate customer value.

• Adopt agility values ​​and principles.

• Have defined roles and responsibilities in the involvement with agile, from the company’s principal.

• Create high-performance, self-organized teams.

• Involve executives, HR, finance, PMO and other teams in the journey to an agile company.

• Establish a pipeline that spans from idea to delivery.

• Have a flexible and adaptable budget to handle changes brought by customers.

• Reinventing HR as a driver of agility across the company.

• Establish goals and a metrics dashboard on agility.

• Establish a journey to agile transformation, involving the entire company.

In short, Business Agility has to be planned on an appropriate script, governed and its implementation requires the involvement of everyone, starting with the company’s main executive and a strong change in the mindset of the people in the company.