Practical Agile Management — Continuously Improve your Business Operations

There is a largely unspoken truth about Agile and that it hasn’t been very successful in translating and enabling business operations to support agility. This is for a whole host of reasons, some from the Agile framework industry and some from business leadership. Regardless of where the blame may be placed, the fact of the matter is that Agile has not made inroads as a management approach to operational agility.

Practical Agile Management is a way to understand how to operationalize agility within specific business operation capabilities, in a way that allows your leaders to incorporate agility into how they work, thus minimizing the negativity surrounding agile.

Practical Agile Management will leverage the three operational pillars companies care about:

Transparency, Accountability, and Predictability

These three pillars form the foundation for integrating agile into your operational model. We call this TAP2 Change. By focusing on three behavioral pillars, we provide your leaders and manager control over how agility is applied to their day-to-day operations while understanding how to work with their organizational counterparts to align agility across the organization, to deliver enhanced flow, productivity, and quality that benefits your customers and your bottom line.

There are 9 core business operations that exist in almost every organization, they are:

1. Strategic Planning

2. Financial Management

3. Customer Service

4. Operations Management

5. HR Management

6. Marketing and Advertising

7. Risk Management

8. Legal and Compliance

9. Information Technology

Practical Agile Management will provide you with the information necessary to understand what aspects of these business operation capabilities need to be updated to support operational agility. And in taking this integrative approach we remove the need for large agile transformation efforts that have relied on the implementation of a framework, which becomes a secondary and inefficient operating model that sits outside of the main business operating model and can’t deliver long-term value as it does not change the underlying operational context of the organization. All it takes is a bit of operational stress, and everyone in the organization goes back to the way they worked before, framework agility is temporary in its impact on the organization unless we update the business operations to incorporate agility into current business processes.

We will walk through the nine core business operations and identify areas where changes must be made to enable agility, and what the impacts of those changes mean across the organization.

For example, you will hear agile coaches tell you decision-making must be pushed down into the organization, yet they provide you with no context to how to make that work. Simply telling people who aren’t traditionally decision-makers to start making decisions won’t improve business operations without those people understanding what makes a good decision, how to make the decision, and how to communicate why the decision was made. Decision-making in an agile organization is distributed widely, but in so doing we need to ensure that the decisions being made are aligned with the organization’s business goals and objectives.

In the coming weeks, I will be writing about the changes needed to make in the nine core business capabilities while I complete the writing of my book of the same title — Practical Agile Management.

If you would like to join the mailing list for information on Practical Agile and my book please send me an email at michael@soundagile.com