Is Your Organization Really Agile?

 

 

For plants to grow, they need fertile soil and good irrigation. If either one of this is lacking, the growth is impeded. Fertile soil provides nutrients to the plants and water enables the plant to photosynthesize sunlight. If water is completely cut off or if the soil becomes infertile, the plant dies. Hence a gardener’s primary focus is to ensure the soil is fertile and a continuous source of water is always provided.

 

Being agile means being able to quickly detect changes as they unfold and respond appropriately to take advantage of that change. Employees within an organization tend to be agile when they understand the importance of developing knowledge sharing capability and adaptability. Knowledge sharing is critical for an organization to quickly sense changes to an environment. Adaptability is critical to be able to respond to changes in the environment.

 

Just as the analogy above suggests, as long as there is water and the soil is maintained well, the plant will grow. Similarly, as long as knowledge sharing at an organizational level is actively instituted and the key nutrients for adaptability are nurtured, employees will be accountable for adapting and delivering results. Over time, with better ability to detect changes and adapting appropriately to change, the level of agility improves. Hence, management’s key focus should be to continually improve organizational knowledge sharing and adaptability in the face of changing business requirements.

 

The key nutrients for adaptability of an organization towards environmental changes is premised on its ability to

• Create change as and when the need to do so arises
• Focus on the needs of the customer, that is, being customer centric
• Engage in practices that contribute to being able to learn, unlearn and relearn faster

 

All organizations are agile to some extent. Organizational agility is not something you either have or don’t have. It is something that varies on a sliding scale. The concern is whether your organization is sufficiently agile to deal with the business environment that it is in. If the need for agility and the rate at which your organization increases its agility capabilities do not match up, you will be severely impacted. To keep pace and ensure continual growth in agility requires an ability to assess how agile your organization is. For this, an assessment tool for agility is required.

 

The lack of a validated and reliable assessment tool for agility is a severe impediment. Such a tool should be able to assess the degree to which essential requirements for agility are met. They should be easily administered to respondents and contain questions that are both relevant to assessment of agility and validated by well-established models.

 

Unless accurate and reliable assessments of the extent which agile practices are being undertaken in practice, concrete attempts to improve the maturity of agile practices will be hampered. This in turn will frustrate attempts to develop an agile based workforce that embraces the culture of flexibility and self-organization. With such a tool in place, it becomes possible to assess how well your organization fares in terms of creating change, being customer centric and engages in knowledge sharing practices.

 

Sharma Management International, in associated with its international partners, has developed a validated and reliable assessment tool that measures the degree of agility in organizations. This assessment is based on validated models that are relevant to measuring agility.

 

For a trial assessment and a more detailed proposal regarding Agility Maturity Assessment Tool, on how Agile your organization is, please contact us here.

 

Dr Rumesh Kumar,

PMP, SMC, CST,

June 2020

Author Profile

Asst. Prof. Dr. Rumesh Kumar is a:-

• Certified Professional Trainer;
• Certified Knowledge Manager;
• Certified Project Management Professional;
• ScrumStudy Certified Trainer; and
• Certified Tetramap facilitator.

He specializes in areas of agile project management, knowledge management and organizational diagnostics. He has trained hundreds of participants, from multiple organizations such as Tan Chong Motors, Shell and Maxis Communications to become Scrum Master Certified.