Agile acceptance in the Business world

Agile has shaken the business world unlike any other trend (sic!). Initially Agile was for the mavericks, it was just tolerated. Realizing that Agile is bringing real business benefits by IT & Engineering professionals they started adopting it. Now it was the turn of executives of IT & Engineering to realize the benefits of Agile. Came the mad rush of the Agile transformation. Now, Agile is crossing the boundaries of IT & Engineering and getting noticed for its effectiveness, resiliency, and sustainability with increasing efficiency and productivity. It is time for Business Agility. It is time to embrace Agile.

Before moving forward, let’s understand the meanings of words we have used:

• Tolerate: Allow existence without interference
• Adopt: Choose to follow or use
• Transform: Make a thorough or dramatic change in the form, appearance or character, become like someone else
• Embrace: Accept willingly and enthusiastically, do not become them; retain your unique identity

I feel, it is the time to tabularize the differences in the Agile Adoption, Agile transformation, and Embracing Agile:

	Characteristics	Agile Adoption	Agile Transformation	Embracing Agile
0	Essence	Doing	Moving toward Being from Doing	Being
1	Mechanism	Commanded	Evangelical approach (my way is better than yours, convert)	Collective Directive Evolution
2	Planning time frame	Short term	Medium term	Long term
3	Speed of change	Fastest	Fast	Slow
4	Working Style	Success driven	Success driven	Culture and Relationship  driven to achieve success
5	Focus	Process Change	Process change leads to culture change	Culture first, process change follows
		Efficiency & Productivity	Efficiency & Productivity	Effectiveness, Resiliency and Sustainability drive Efficiency & Productivity
6	Change in culture	Localized if any	Patches	Seamless across organization
7	Extent of Change	IT & Engineering	IT & Engineering also touching Sales & Marketing	Organization wide changes
8	Sustainability of change	High probability of relapsing to old ways	Organization remembers few things from change even in case of relapse	New culture is the norm
9	Most visible feature	Scrum/Kanban replaces waterfall in selected areas	Scrum/Kanban replaces waterfall across the board and understanding of Agile values and principles in select patches	Scrum/Kanban replaces waterfall across the board and immersive understanding of Agile values and principles across the board
10	Organizational Change	Superficial, little or none	Significant, cross functional	Flattens the org structure
11	Productivity & Efficiency gain
12	Effectiveness gain
13	Direction of change

 

Change via Directed Evolution

We all agree that – Change is the only constant. 

Yet, no one’s ever ready for it? Let’s get ready for this constant.

Change is everywhere and its pace is accelerating with every passing moment.  Change is occurring in every aspect of business – markets, regulatory, and technologies. Change is very evident in how people like to be treated by businesses. Have you heard the term – Knowledge worker?  Due to a shift from repetitive work to craftsmanship and focus on innovation, a culture shift is required in the way the businesses treat their workers and customers. Workers need a more inclusive environment – focused on learning, individualistic expression, and growth opportunities. Customers want newer and shinier features availability sooner and businesses must have their feedback.

Can businesses expect these changes mere by changes in processes and practices keeping the culture the same? I don’t think so. Organizations need to change at a fundamental level – how are they organized, how do they treat their employees, how do they treat their customers, how do they treat their vendors or partners? How the contracts are structured?  How the communication within and outside the organization is structured? How are products marketed and sold? Every aspect is changing.

Can you leave these changes to evolution; after all, evolution was able to bring intelligent life on this planet? Do you have a time of billion years? Then, what is the solution? A solution lies in directed evolution using our intelligence. Is your organization ready for directed evolution?