“The surest sign that agile is working,” an agency CEO says, “is when you see an entire organisation becoming obsessed with customer satisfaction, and everybody believes that their work is serving a customer.” That’s true even if the customer is an internal one; every work activity has a customer. By contrast, he says, “the surest sign that agile is being done wrong is that the people are using agile language, but there isn’t a noticeable culture of concern for customers and employees.”
So what makes the culture of organisation agile? According to DEC, there are 6 key elements to an agile organisation:
Agile accelerates successful adaptation through deep customer (internal and external) collaboration and adaptive testing (of products/services) and constant learning. Lots of ‘agile’ or ‘scrum’ teams up and running, to deliver customer outputs, and calling a meeting a ‘stand-up’ does not mean that an organisation is more agile.
A significant part of an agile transformation is change management work. Behavioural and cultural change work and transforming an organisation’s ways of working is key to making agile, as a methodology, stick.
In the time of COVID-19, many organisations have accelerated their shift, to becoming more agile as an enterprise. As they have realised, agile is a mindset change across the whole organisation, not just a delivery method.
What does agile mean to you?