The 4 Must-Have Agile Traits Your Company Needs to Succeed
Organizational agility is the ability of an organization to effectively and quickly
adapt to changes in the marketplace in order to attract and delight customers. While
most organizations today can learn and apply Agile practices, making them stick and
leveraging them toward future market needs is a challenge.
Organizational agility is the difference between "doing" an Agile process and
"being" an Agile organization. To accomplish this, an organization must lead agility
from the "inside-out" - that is, starting with leadership aligning cultural values toward
agility and building structures within the organization to support agility.
A primary reason for the failure to sustain and grow agility within organizations
is because they are focused on "doing" an Agile process outside-in, without
consideration of the structures and cultural values required to support it. Thus, like a
product without a well-established architecture, it will likely cripple under the pressure
of growth and change.
Enterprise-Level Commitment
Organizational agility is an enterprise-level agility. Team-based agility is common and many companies find it
relatively easy to accomplish. Multiple independent team agility is more difficult, especially if the organization
has a high-degree of role specialization and difficulty with single team focus. Organizational agility is a culture
of agility and works across many inter-dependent teams, departments, and locations to accomplish common
goals or objectives. Organizational agility requires leadership guidance, flexible organizational structures,
horizontal team engagement and focus, and shared values espoused through leadership.
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