The fact that you are asking about agile is a good start. You may have heard other people, including competitors, discuss how they are improving their business with agile coaching for agile ways of working.
by Mark McKee, 25 April 2022
I’ve seen some prestigious businesses showcasing their shift to business agility on some high-profile video campaigns on LinkedIn, for example, so this is clearly a hot issue for firms all around the world as we leave behind the industrial age and embrace the digital age fully.
When I meet with you as a client, I start by asking what problems you are trying to solve. That is the only starting point that can lead to success. Without knowing the problems that are forcing a rethink, then trying to be more agile is going to waste your time and money. Sadly, too many coaches and consultancies will come in with their playbook and may not have you in mind as to whether the playbook fits your context. Every firm is different, after all, and you have your unique products/services, culture and business challenges.
What is involved in bringing in agile experts?
Once we have line of slight sight on the business problems, we can then start looking at your organisation goals, culture and competitive landscape. The outcomes should be focused on what is going to delight customers, grow market share and junk what is unprofitable or downright slowing everything up in a fast-moving competitive landscape.
I should note at this state that business agility is:
- Not about technology, but your organisation and helping identify how to streamline processes in how to get your products to market (‘products’ is a catch-all for services and physical goods that reach your customers)
- Whilst technology is front and centre in the age of digital, it needs to be surrounded by a change in culture to make the investments in technology return strong results
Agile coaching for leadership
This is where we discuss the issues that you and your leadership team face in making your business more nimble, cost-effective and adaptive. We may end up applying systems thinking to nudge stubborn impediments into business opportunities. We also want to manage the message carefully as looking at improving the business cannot be seen as a top-down mandate – people hate things being thrust upon them!
Agile coaching for teams
Working at the team-level is where leadership and the teams need to meet. Working on small-scale experiments to learn from and grow confidence with winning results is how to create a culture that wants to adopt those successes. As teams on the ground, we don’t want to miss out on what those other teams who are being celebrated are doing, do we?
How is success measured?
There is no point investing in agile ways of working without gaining feedback that allows you to see if you are improving. We use a very helpful tool for this: objectives and key results (OKRs). Here is an example:
Objective: We want see a 20% faster time to market of for new products by end of year.
Key results: This will be proved by:
- Defects will be cut by 20% through more test automation
- The priorities for the product area will be owned by X and reviewed every two weeks to make sure we focus on the most important things
Reviewing this every month to see how things are progressing is a useful tool.
Build small, get bigger later!
Again, I encourage learning, inspecting and adapting before moving towards trying to scale things up across a wider set of teams or a line of business. You’ll be able to get feedback from teams, customers and other parties (regulators, auditors, etc.). You will get to know what good looks like, which means tangible results that show great business outcomes and data on what needs to be adjusted, whilst getting help setting up the skills and habits to then be in a position to scale up with more confidence and support from your people.
Find out more
Talk to us to find out more.
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