Five benefits of applying enterprise agility in business

The concept of agility was born more than 20 years ago, with the appearance of the «manifesto for agile software development» on February 12, 2001 in Utah, United States. In these two decades, these concepts have spread far beyond the construction of applications and today are consolidated as an essential path for companies seeking to be resilient, adaptable, flexible and dynamic to face a rapidly changing overview.

What does agility propose? That there should always be fluid contact between all parts of a project, that rapid and interactive progress should be programmed based on immediate feedback and the idea of continuous improvement, that communication should be carried out with the highest possible levels of transparency, that there should be multidisciplinary teams with the ability to self-organize and motivate themselves, and that mistakes should be considered part of a learning process instead of a reason for penalizing.

The road to agile

For a company to be agile, it is not enough to use a market framework (such as the well-known Scrum) or to implement the methodologies in certain teams. To be truly agile, it is necessary to make a cultural leap that encompasses the entire organization and impacts the way it works.

Fundamentally, it requires a leadership that supports and promotes this new vision, because without it, it is difficult to achieve the expected result: it is essential that those who lead the teams are convinced that it is positive to empower each of its members to be agents of change.

A work of patience

On the other hand, it must be considered that there is no «agility» button within the company to be pressed for things to start working differently. In fact, a paper by The Business Agility Report, one of the authorities on this subject, estimates that on average it takes two years between a company making its first moves in the direction of agility and seeing the first significant results.

This is a very important fact, because when anxiety wins the day, frustration sets in and many projects stop prematurely.

The five major advantages of agility

Although the advantages of business agility applied to business are numerous, there are five that stand out above the rest:

1. Accelerate time-to-market. By working in a gradual, iterative and incremental way, the company tends to create new products, services, customer experiences or business models knowing that it will be able to test them quickly, evaluate whether they work or not, correct them if necessary and subject them to continuous improvement while they are already in the production stage.
2. Encourage innovation. By considering error as part of the process, those involved are encouraged to try new things.
3. Promote excellence. Work with the concept that everything can be improved. The quality levels of products and services, as well as the work models within the team, increase continuously and significantly.
4. Deliver value to all stakeholders. The benefits of agility reach the work team and its leaders, as they perform in an environment of transparency and collaboration, the customers, who receive better products and services, and the organization’s top management, who obtain better business results.
5. Improving the business. Harvard Business Review states that 60% of companies that adopt an agile model increase their revenues and profits.

But perhaps the main benefit of implementing agility on an enterprise scale is to have an adaptive capacity that will allow the organization to survive and remain competitive, come what may.