One of the biggest challenges for organizations is to become fully agile organizations. In case you haven’t heard yet, this feature is totally necessary today for a business to be able to function by adapting to the demands of the digital world. It has many advantages that favor the company, client, and workers. So how do you create agile organizations? In this post, we tell you. Keep reading!
What Is An Agile Organization?
An agile organization is characterized by the fact that it adapts to changes and new market requirements in the shortest possible time. The organization shows proactive behavior – it always acts in a future-oriented manner and causes changes itself.
The most important thing for an agile organization is that although it has a stable foundation, it acts quickly and purposefully in its processes. This is the only way to guarantee flexibility and adaptability.
It is the prerequisite for agile working. Agile working methods are only possible when an agile mindset prevails throughout the company. An agile mindset is characterized by very specific values and principles:
- Personal Responsibility
- Customer Focus
- Result Orientation
- Transparency
- Open Communication
- Respect, Fairness, And Tolerance
- relationship orientation
- Flexibility & Change
Why Migrate To Agile Organizations?
There are many reasons that guarantee the success of agile organizations, the internal and external transformation of businesses is occurring more and more quickly and is totally necessary. How can a business that does not apply agile methodologies survive? The answer is that it will be difficult. With this new paradigm arises the profile of the Project Manager.
Agile organizations already know that the new times call for reconfiguring strategies, processes, talent, and technologies. Therefore, the culture of the company and its human capital must be the most important thing in agile organizations. I encourage you to read more about this blog here: How To Improve The Alignment Between Business And IT
How To Create Agile Organizations?
1. Establish The Mission
Companies that use agile methodologies focus on adding value to people and the rest of society. An organization that transcends, that every day, week, or month the contribution it has made to society can be measured, and that the benefit is a consequence of said activity.
2. Hierarchies Are Reduced
Hierarchical structures remain outdated, agile organizations opt to be flatter, with multidisciplinary autonomy teams, created by projects or lines of activity. Teams where the roles are defined, but that have the option of changing roles, with justification, through the design of a professional career.
3. Fluid Teams
To create an organization with agile methodologies, it is necessary to have teams that coordinate smoothly among its members and with other teams in the organization, even if they work remotely, creating spaces to share an understanding that these meetings are necessary and productive.
4. Task Management
The use of tools should also be taken care of. For example, instead of creating repetitive tasks that seem boring to workers, they can use other forms of work that enhance their personal development.
There are multiple project management tools so that teams can perform their work in an agile way, facilitating the ideation and creation of new content.
5. Culture Of Experimentation
This refers to workers having time in their working day to experiment and learn about new ways of working, having ideas, sharing them with the team, and giving space to innovation.
6. Open Communication
Agile organizations must be transparent to all stakeholders. This means that the people who work in the same team must know what the functions of their colleagues and the rest of the teams are, and be aware of the objectives, lines of action, and mission to create an effective and efficient system.
It is important to understand the implications of the change in the organizational model. It is not about going through a purely aesthetic restyling process based on a concept that may be a trend, it is about wanting to do things in a totally different way to adapt to the needs and continuous changes of a globalized and technological market.
What Are The Advantages Of The Agile Organization?
Especially in turbulent markets with changing customer needs, agility is becoming a decisive competitive factor for companies. This is where agile organizations offer numerous advantages over traditionally organized companies, as confirmed by a study by the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation (IPA) (emphasis added by the author):
- Greater dynamics and flexibility enable faster adaptation to shorter product life cycles and increase customer requirements.
- Agility leads to accelerated time-to-market for products by reducing development times.
- Employee satisfaction increases.
In order to be successful in the long term, companies should therefore “agile” their internal cooperation. In essence, this means: The framework conditions of the organization must enable the members to recognize changes, process them, and react to them quickly. As outlined above, this does not mean establishing individual agile teams in classically structured organizations. Companies only survive in the long term if they change their organization to an agile organizational model.
Keys To Theorganizeagile Tions
Any company that has decided to improve with agile methodologies must embark on a path of transformation in which several things must be taken into account.
- It is essential to have a good specialized team of professionals. For this reason, it is so important to have specific training on specific profiles to assume the transformation process.
- One of the key points of agile organizations is based on the focus on people. It is critical to establish a fully transparent and participatory communication system regarding the objectives and activities to be carried out.
- The transformation must be the tool to reach the objectives. It is not so much the result as the way to reach the goal. Here, the ability to define metrics and continuous analysis allows decisions to be made about the real impact of the transformation process.
What Should Agile Organizations Have?
According to an article prepared by the consulting firm McKinsey, in which more than 50 professionals specializing in key areas of organizational transformation collaborated, the 5 characteristics that an agile organization must have are:
Strategy
We work with the concept of a “Polar Star incorporated throughout the organization”. It focuses the organization’s strategy on creating value, not only for customers, but also for employees, investors, partners, or even communities around them. This allows greater involvement of all the stakeholders involved and in the same way, a greater capacity to detect needs in a much more agile way.
Structure
The concept of teams that receive orders evolves to teams that receive responsibilities and work with facilitators for the development of their activity. To do this, we work with:
- Fully horizontal structures reduce bureaucracy in decision-making.
- Well-defined and identified roles.
- Practical governance to bring decision-making as close as possible to the teams.
- Generation of communities of knowledge and practice to share know-how.
- Creation of active associations and an ecosystem that expands internal networks and that facilitates the incorporation of talent.
- Implementation of new work environments to achieve greater effectiveness in the activity carried out by the different teams.
Processes
There must be an evolution from long and tedious processes to “rapid cycles of thought and action”. The application of iterative models in project management allows greater adaptation to the needs of the context, as well as greater ease in offering quick solutions to the demands received.
People
It goes from control by profiles oriented to command to the accompaniment of people to obtain more performance from individual skills. In the same way, the rotation of roles is promoted to enrich the experiences of the people who are part of the organization.
Technology
Technology is perceived as a medium that should facilitate communication and management in a changing and agile environment. New mechanisms are introduced that allow collaborative work to be approached as an environment for receiving, managing, and analyzing information in a totally natural way.
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Conclusions
As advantageous and promising as the concept of agile organization sounds, it is not suitable for all types of tasks. In some areas, classic management methods are more advantageous. In departments such as accounting, legal, and tax, for example, it tends to be more difficult to implement agility. On the other hand, areas of the company that deal with innovation, product development, and customer involvement do better with agile working methods.
Another problem is the difficulty of implementation. Many restructuring measures fail because they are underestimated or not approached with the necessary prerequisites or commitment. On the one hand, agile organizations are complex, on the other hand, they require completely new ways of thinking and acting. Both cannot be switched overnight and you have to be prepared for a longer process.
So what exactly does an agile transformation require?
- Capable people to guide the restructuring process.
- Willingness to change and willingness to change the entire mindset of the company.
- Awareness of what the change will entail.
- Employees who are well-trained and motivated to work independently.
- Awareness of problems that cannot be solved with agility. Internal conflicts and a shortage of skilled workers, for example, cannot be remedied using agile methods.
Learn More About How To Create Agile Organizations? From businessjohn
