The business world is unpredictable and ever-changing. The needs of customers, conditions of your employees, and expectations of shareholders are changing any moment. Therefore, businesses need to be equipped with the tools to meet those demands with agility.
The economy is inherently fluid and complicated, but it has been even more dynamic in the last decades. While countless businesses saw success in growing their business naturally and gradually in the past, slow and steady ones don’t win the race anymore.
A successful enterprise requires engaged employees, flexible practices, and innovative approaches to business.
What is Agile Enterprise?
At its core, an agile enterprise is a business equipped to adapt to the changes in the dynamic needs of the markets, customer expectations, and shareholder feedback.
Enterprise agility can cover any business process, from a more streamlined customer experience to an optimized production line. Any business can adopt an agile mindset in every imaginable field.
By adopting a more agile approach, you increase productivity among your employees and efficiency for your business. 98% of companies that made an effort to adopt agile business practices say they have benefited from their efforts.
In an agile business, individual teams and departments that are responsible for different duties can work together more cooperatively and consciously, using minimal resources. For this reason, an agile enterprise team requires the abilities to take in feedback and improve their products or services to increase the company's output.
Domains of Business Agility
In order for a business to be truly agile, all the teams must do their tasks in a way that creates perfect harmony and flexibility. All the efforts from the top executives to the employees must adhere to the same principle. While they work with the same principle in mind, their way of contributing to achieving agility will be different. Nonetheless, all the teams must do their part to reach this goal.
Management
Fundamental changes to a company’s structure and mindset start from the top. So, any business looking to be flexible should create this change from a leadership level.
The top executives of an enterprise should think of the entire company as one big team with a common goal, not as individual departments with their own duties. The planning process should reflect this principle. Agile project development should be the number one priority at this stage.
Agile strategies can only be adopted when the team effectively starts working together as a big unit. That’s also how the recruitment process should go. Agile enterprises are supposed to hire employees with higher potential for nurturing, development and education.
Partners
Then you will have your partners. These members will include entities that are not involved in your operations directly but will be your business partners. These will consist of your shareholders and adjacent businesses that you collaborate with.
A business must share a goal with their partners. You need to have common ground for how you are going to set goals and achieve them without getting slowed down by bureaucracy. Your shareholders and collaborators should enable you to practice an agile framework and support you in your effort to create better value for your customers.
Employees
And all of this would be a waste of time if you couldn’t achieve agility on an individual level. Studies show that around 50% of employees feel disengaged in the workplace. You need to change this if you want to maximize agility and productivity.
You need to integrate each of your employees into your business on a personal level. Enterprise agility requires deep care and accountability on an individual level to succeed. Your team members must have an open mind, motivation to learn, and desire to grow as people and a company. In addition, they will require proper leadership in their duties and division of labor.
How Automation Helps Enterprise Agility
Agility requires effectiveness. Throughout the day, every individual’s duty should be to minimize productivity leaks to achieve higher effectiveness. That’s why automating simple and repetitive tasks is essential to save person-hours.
The tools your teams utilize will make all the difference between a slow, unproductive system and a well-oiled machine. You can boost enterprise agility with software that will help you a better division of labor, communicate with your team better, and determine the market values of your services. Automation is the key to high-performance teams in today’s digitally transformative business life.
Conclusion
To be a successful business requires an innovative, open mindset nowadays. So you should always strive to achieve the gold standard and become an industry figurehead in terms of agility to maximize profits and customer satisfaction. Because to adapt is to survive and thrive.
Don’t make the same mistake countless other companies have made and get stuck in your old ways. Instead, have an open mind to change and evolve. Contact us to discover the ways to go agile togeth