Business Agility is the new talk of the town. However, I see it as an outcome, the value received if you have paid the right price for it. You cannot have business agility by training the senior management and leadership on Lean thinking or a set of Agile values and principles. To enable business agility, the proper foundation has to be in place. The teams that work tirelessly to create valuable products need to be empowered and encouraged to embrace agility in the proper sense.
The Insight:
About 7-8 years ago, there was a significant shift in shopping behavior in India. E-commerce became the next big thing, and two big players emerged. One was homegrown while the other an international giant (I too created an eCommerce application but no buyers came). The homegrown player suddenly disrupted the market by announcing a sale like never before. That was a change that could have overthrown the international giant out of the Indian market. However, the global giant came up with a quick reply (if I remember correctly) in a week’s time and announced a sale of its own and not only saved the day but went on to become the market leader in the years to come.
In the backdrop of all those events, a question pops up. How was this made possible?
How was a global company showcase “Business Agility” to “respond to change” in its domain and not in its control? The leaders must have learned about business agility and must have decided to change the course of action. Oh, yes! But they weren’t the implementers of the functionality. It had to be implemented by the engineers on the team, and if they didn’t embrace agility, it would have been a difficult feat if not impossible to achieve.
To view the full blog and this blog "What makes Team and Technical Agility a must for scaling?" is originally published on Agilemania website.
