Agile transformation: How does it work?

Digitalization is transplanting customer expectations. This affects the speed and the way organizations have to react to digital developments.

The Agile way of working is a way for organizations to react to these changes and is often the chosen approach by leading organizations in the digital era. It facilitates organizations to get a better understanding of changing customer needs, fast and continuous improvement of customer interaction, smarter, and in most cases, cheaper way of working, while increasing transparency, happier company culture with increased employee satisfaction and attractiveness.

The Agile way of working started in IT software development teams. Today it is applied to enterprise level, and integrates business and IT across all departments.

How does it work? Agile changes the way the entire organization operates. Hierarchical departments with managers are transformed into small self-steering teams. These teams consist of members with different backgrounds, for example, from marketing, sales, customer experience, administration, data, and IT. The teams are end-to-end responsible for their customer driven purpose and are led by a product owner.

So, how do you implement an Agile operating model? Achieving broader business agility all starts small by experimenting with a few Agile teams. The next step is to scale Agile methods and principles across teams for a selected number of divisions. The final step is a full business enabled Agile transformation. Agility is incorporated at an enterprise level, which requires adopting agility in the DNA of the entire organization. There are various scaling frameworks and models that can help you in this journey.

The journey to enterprise agility requires courage and perseverance. But by taking these steps to enterprise agility, organizations are able to focus on providing superior experience for everyone, better, faster, smarter, and happier.