Transforming Organizations: Agile Success and Future-Proof Your Business

Transforming Organizations: Reimagining Teams as Mini-Businesses to Achieve Agile Success and Future-Proof Your Business

Agility is the buzzword in todays fast-paced business environment. To stay ahead of the competition, organizations need to reimagine themselves as networks of high-performing teams that focus on end-to-end business outcomes rather than just functional tasks. These interconnected mini businesses are obsessed with creating value and achieving success. To achieve agility at scale, companies must transform their operating model by building an effective, stable backbone that optimizes the full operating model across strategy, structures, processes, people, and technology. This includes going after flat and fluid structures built around high-performing cross-functional teams, instituting more frequent prioritization and resource-allocation processes, building a culture that enables psychological safety, and decoupling technology stacks.

Agility results in a step change in performance and makes it possible to overtake born-agile organizations. Highly successful agile transformations typically deliver around 30 percent gains in efficiency, customer satisfaction, employee engagement, and operational performance. So why wait for agility to happen bottom-up? Leaders must take charge and ensure the top team gets it. But achieving agility isnt just about building agile teams. To maximize the value of technology investments, operate with agility, predict and respond to customer and employee needs, remain competitive, and drive shareholder value, companies should fuse together separate business and technology strategies into a single unified strategy. Imagine the company as an engine with multiple gears, in which every gear moves in unison so that the engine operates efficiently. This approach emphasizes three dimensions: key drivers, strategy, and technology vision.

To achieve this, companies must harness and manage five technology-driven forces: Convergence, Data proliferation, Competing horizons, Customer empowerment, and Speed and volatility. By doing so, they can ensure the traditional role of ensuring operational excellence and executing technology-enabled business objectives. The future of technology work, workforce, and workplace is also changing rapidly. Due to the emergence of cloud, robotics, cognitive, and artificial intelligence (AI), among other technologies, work that was previously the domain of the IT function and primarily performed by humans is now being augmented, distributed, and undertaken by service providers and machines. To deliver the new technology work, businesses will likely need fresh skills and capabilities. Leaders are increasingly using the open talent continuum to acquire, retain, and curate these skills. Advances in mobility and connectivity have also bolstered the use of collaboration and teaming tools; technologies such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are emerging as the new frontier in collaboration. Many leaders are realizing that cocreation between business and technology functions can require physical proximity and workspaces conducive to collaboration and innovation.

In conclusion, agility is the key to success in todays fast-paced business environment. By building agile teams, fusing together separate business and technology strategies, and harnessing technology-driven forces, companies can achieve agility at scale and stay ahead of the competition. The future of technology work, workforce, and workplace is also changing rapidly, and businesses must adapt to stay relevant. Are you ready to reimagine your organization and achieve agility at scale?