“Most organizations die of indigestions, not of starvation”
Business agility is not merely about changing direction faster, it’s necessary but not sufficient. Our aim is to respond to beneficial change and be more resilient.This means, in addition, to be able to change fast, also being able to identify when it’s needed, at all levels of the organization. Consider for a moment the flow of work through an organization from idea to value.
Typically this journey more often takes years rather than months or weeks.
Months are spent waiting for scoping and planning, approval Committees and feasibility assessments. Then once the decision is finally made to go ahead, If Business Agility requires being able to quickly adjust course.
Good ideas joining the back of a long, slow-moving queue, meandering through an unfit process, to be delivered once every few months, is the opposite. Visualisation and manage flow to reduce waiting.
Visualise the work and workflow, to understand where wait time is creeping in. Limit wip, push more of the total capacity into each item.
Reduce the batch size, make items smaller so the capacity required is smaller. Order items by CD3, hypothesis of what value will be derived, and the impact of delay of that value
Inspect regularly, and update your workflow and economic models to match your improved understanding of Reality.
Underpinning all of this is a Culture amplifying the potential to learn, by engaging the entire workforce in discovery of problems, and implementation of solutions. This requires not only decentralisation decision making, but also the information needed to make healthy decisions, as well as the Safety (technological and physiological) to experiment, without fear of catastrophic failure.
The aim being to not only do things right but to also do the right things.
