Agility of an Organization
While IT organizations have benefited tremendously from adopting Agile, the question that keeps cropping up is - 'Is Agile applicable to only IT organizations or can other organizations benefit from the Agile values, principles and practices as well?' Aren't these practices common enough to be applicable to other areas of the organization, not just IT?
If we take self organization, doesn't it come naturally to people and teams - people tend to self organize - they meet, discuss, agree on topics and areas of common interest. Isn't it the default behavior that teams exhibit?
Isn't the job of the manager, more of a facilitator and a coach who is empowering the team to make their own decisions and choices? The manager guides the team when they are young but the team tends to fix their own problems once they mature.
Aren't the Customers the most important stakeholders with whom we talk and collaborate on a daily basis to understand and fulfill their ever changing needs?
As the Agile practices have started to mature over the past many years, they are being adopted by a large number of non-IT organizations and are redefining the ways in which these organizations manage themselves, provide fulfilling work to their employees and generate results for their customers. Organizations like General Electric, John Deere, CH Robinson and many others are already transforming themselves using some of these principles and practices and are seeing the results of being Agile.
If we delve deeper into some of the organization characteristics that make an organization Agile, we realize that the Agile values and principles can be applied across industries, and not just the IT industry.
Some of the characteristics that an be looked at to define the Agility of an organization are - Time to Market, Continuous Improvement, Team Collaboration and Empowerment, Work Planning and Progress tracking, Collective ownership, Leadership support and flexibility etc. Using these and many more organizational characteristics, we can measure and define the Agility Index of an organization and team across industries and businesses.
What I have understand and observed is that at the foundation level, Lean Principles are more relevant in an organization. There is a level of efficiency improvement and optimization that is to be achieved before organizations start their journey to be an agile organization. On the foundation of Lean, some areas can be selectively picked up and Agile adopted for those, however a jump towards Agile organization without sorting out efficiency and optimization at ground level will not get the organization anywhere. While agile principles are all good and can be scaled up for the organization, the real challenge comes when different clients (for a services company) and different customer journeys (in an end user company) could demand different levels of agile maturity. For each of these requirements at different maturity levels, the underlying organization processes/systems and culture needs to be supportive of what we build on top of it. For ex: what is turnaround time for setting up a new team (staffing/ hiring/ contracting) and does that support requirements that come from a mature agile team in the company which is looking for a burst capacity for next few sprints? Similarly, what are the underlying processes for capability/ people processes/ sales cycle - if they are not lean enough, building agility on top of it could only succeed selectively in pockets.
Cannot agree more to this, Dev. Kanban/Scrum is equally applicable to non-IT organisations and I have seen lot traction with my BPOs/KPOs clients. Agile values and principles are universal and applicable to any orgnisation and more so in your personal life as well !
Well written Dev. I think already such standards and principles are defined. If you see service industry then ITIL standards are there. I believe that definitely Agile framework and principles can be extended.