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Business Agility

Empower organisations to swiftly adapt and innovate, ensuring continuous delivery of value in a dynamic marketplace.

Enable Business Agility to rapidly adapt, innovate, and deliver value in an ever-changing market.

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Overview

Business Agility refers to an organisation’s ability to rapidly adapt and respond to market changes, customer demands, and emerging opportunities while maintaining a focus on delivering value. This concept is crucial as it empowers teams to innovate continuously, streamline processes, and enhance collaboration across functions. By fostering a culture of flexibility and responsiveness, organisations can navigate uncertainties and leverage their capabilities to meet evolving business needs.

Business Agility is not merely about adopting Agile methodologies; it encompasses a systemic approach that integrates principles from Lean, DevOps, and continuous improvement. This holistic perspective enables organisations to optimise workflows, reduce lead times, and enhance customer satisfaction. It encourages a mindset where experimentation and learning are valued, allowing teams to pivot quickly based on feedback and data-driven insights.

The long-term benefits of Business Agility include improved resilience, sustained competitive advantage, and the ability to deliver high-quality products and services consistently. By embedding agility into the organisational fabric, companies can ensure that they are not just reacting to change but proactively shaping their future in a dynamic marketplace. This proactive stance is essential for fostering innovation and achieving strategic goals, ultimately leading to enhanced value delivery and organisational success.

Learn More about Business Agility

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Agile Product Operating Model

Transform your organisation with the Agile Product Operating Model, blending agile practices and product management to deliver consistent, customer-focused value.
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Open Space Agile

Open Space Agile is an approach to organisational agility that applies the principles of Open Space Technology—a self-organising, agenda-free format for large group collaboration—to Agile transformation. Popularised by Daniel Mezick and others in the Open Leadership Network, Open Space Agile invites everyone in the organisation to co-create the change process, fostering psychological safety, shared ownership, and authentic engagement. Rather than relying on top-down rollout plans, it embraces emergence, letting those closest to the work define priorities and actions through open, iterative dialogue. This approach aligns with complexity thinking and honours the Agile ethos by enabling transformation to unfold organically, adaptively, and in response to real needs.
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    Company as a Product

    Company as a Product (CaaP) is an organisational strategy that treats the entire company as a continuously evolving product, rather than a static structure. It emphasises designing and refining the organisation based on customer feedback, measurable outcomes, and strategic goals—much like product development. Popularised by thought leaders in modern organisational design and continuous discovery, CaaP encourages cross-functional collaboration, experimentation, and alignment across all levels. Instead of optimising for internal efficiency or hierarchy, it focuses on delivering value to customers and adapting the company’s capabilities, systems, and structures as intentionally as one would iterate on a product.
      Blog

      Why Handoffs Are Killing Your Agility

      Excessive handoffs in software development create delays, reduce quality, and harm team morale. Learn how eliminating handoffs boosts agility, flow, and value delivery.
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      Continuous Improvement

      Continuous Improvement is the ongoing practice of relentless reflection and adaptation, driven by empirical evidence, aimed at consistently enhancing processes, products, and team effectiveness. It embodies a commitment to incremental and measurable advancements, fostering a culture of proactive experimentation, rapid feedback, and learning to achieve sustainable and strategic business agility.
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      Value Stream Management

      A strategic approach to improving the flow of value through an organisation, optimising efficiency, reducing waste, and aligning work with customer outcomes.
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      Scaling

      Coordinate multiple teams to deliver complex products while preserving agility. Focus on alignment, flow, and value delivery across the enterprise using lean principles and adaptive product structures.
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      Cell Structure Design

      Cell Structure Design is an organisational design model developed by Niels Pfläging, rooted in the principles of the Beta Codex. It replaces traditional hierarchies with a decentralised, network-based structure composed of autonomous, value-creating units called cells. Each cell operates with end-to-end responsibility, enabling responsiveness, accountability, and continuous adaptation. Informed by complexity theory, Cell Structure Design rejects command-and-control in favour of dynamic coordination and transparency, empowering people to self-organise around customer value rather than roles or silos.
        Blog

        Stop Hiding Behind Complexity and Start Delivering Continuously

        Continuous delivery is achievable for any software, regardless of complexity. Success depends on investment in automation, quality, and process improvement—not technical barriers.
        Videos

        Transforming Agility: How Azure DevOps Went from Two-Year Releases to 880,000 Deployments

        Explores how Azure DevOps shifted from slow, two-year releases to rapid, continuous delivery, highlighting the benefits of fast feedback, agility, and frequent deployments.
        Blog

        Create your own path to Organisational Agility

        Learn how to achieve organisational agility by tailoring change to your unique context, building a guiding coalition, and engaging all stakeholders in continuous improvement.
        Videos

        Is Your Project Ecosystem Truly Agile?

        Explains why true agility requires end-to-end automation and short feedback loops, not just Agile teams, to maximise value and efficiency for stakeholders in project delivery.
        Videos

        Empowering Teams to Maximize Value and Return on Investment

        Explores how empowering Agile teams to adapt their processes boosts flexibility, continuous improvement, collaboration, and maximises value and return on investment.
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        Agnostic Agile

        Agnostic Agile is a movement that promotes ethical, context-driven agility by prioritising principles over rigid frameworks. Championed by thought leaders like Arie van Bennekum, a Dutch signatory of the Agile Manifesto, it encourages practitioners to adapt methods pragmatically based on need rather than ideology. Drawing from diverse approaches such as Scrum, Kanban, Lean, and XP, Agnostic Agile emphasises professionalism, critical thinking, and value delivery over brand loyalty or prescriptive practice.
        Guides

        The Evidence-Based Management Guide: Improving Value Delivery under Conditions of Uncertainty

        Discover more about “The Evidence-Based Management Guide and how it can help you in your Agile journey!
        Blog

        DOD has made it illegal to do waterfall

        The US Department of Defence now requires agile, iterative software development, ending mandatory waterfall methods and influencing global government IT practices.
        Guides

        The Evidence-Based Management Guide Improving Value Delivery under Conditions of Uncertainty

        Discover more about The Evidence-Based Management Guide
        Blog

        Evolution not Transformation: This is the Inevitability of change

        Change in organisations is a continuous, evolutionary process driven by experimentation and adaptation, not a one-time transformation or fixed end state.
        Videos

        How to Achieve Predictability in Business through Agile Principles

        Learn how Agile principles help businesses improve predictability by addressing challenges, optimising systems, aligning goals, and adapting to change for consistent results.
        Videos

        Why are recessions a great time for organizations to evaluate the opportunity of agile?

        Explains why recessions are ideal for organisations to adopt agile, highlighting adaptability, rapid learning, and customer-focused growth in uncertain times.
        Videos

        How Immersive Learning Transforms Aspiring Agile Leaders

        Immersive learning helps aspiring agile leaders overcome cultural barriers by providing time, practical experiments, and peer feedback to drive real organisational change.
        Videos

        Unlocking Organisational Agility: How to Empower Your Team for Rapid Market Response

        Learn how empowering teams, streamlining communication, and providing context enable organisations to respond rapidly to market changes and gain a competitive edge.
        Videos

        Transforming Scope Creep into Success: Embrace Agility and Deliver Value in a Changing Market

        Learn how to turn scope creep into an advantage by adopting Agile methods, focusing on value delivery, and adapting to changing requirements in dynamic markets.
        Videos

        Are Your Teams Empowered to Change Requirements Based on User Feedback? If Not, You’re Probably Not Very Agile

        Empowering teams to adapt requirements based on user feedback is key to true agility. Learn why backlog updates and team engagement drive better, user-focused products.
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        Product Goal is an Intermediate Strategic Goal

        Explains how product goals serve as intermediate strategic goals, guiding agile organisations through uncertainty using experimentation, outcomes, and data-driven discovery.
        Videos

        Evidence-Based Management: The Key to Agile Success

        Evidence-based management uses data-driven decisions to help organisations achieve business outcomes, adapt to market changes, and maximise value beyond agile processes.
        Videos

        Why Cost-Cutting During Recessions Is Counterproductive

        Cutting costs during recessions can harm long-term business success. Investing in people, agility, and continuous improvement builds resilience and drives future growth.
        Videos

        Unlocking Business Agility: Join Our Dynamic Monthly Discussions for Real-World Insights

        Join monthly interactive sessions to discuss real-world business agility challenges, share insights, and learn from diverse peers using a collaborative Lean Coffee format.
        Videos

        Rethinking Budgeting: How to Break Free from Traditional Constraints and Maximise Value

        Explores the limitations of traditional budgeting and explains how flexible, value-driven approaches like Beyond Budgeting can improve agility, innovation, and resource use.
        Videos

        Navigating Complexity: How to Foster Agility and Innovation in Business Decision-Making

        Explores how businesses can boost agility and innovation by adapting decision-making, avoiding bureaucracy, and fostering continuous learning in complex environments.
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        Continuous Adaptation: The Key to Success in a Dynamic Market

        Explores how businesses and individuals can achieve success by embracing continuous adaptation, flexibility, and principle-based decision-making in dynamic markets.
        Blog

        The Race for Market Responsiveness: A Fresh Perspective on Organisational Agility

        Explores why true organisational agility means building custom processes to respond quickly to market changes, not just adopting popular frameworks or hybrid models.
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        The Urgent Call for Agile Organisational Transformation

        Explores why traditional hierarchical organisations struggle in fast-changing markets and argues for agile, decentralised structures to boost adaptability and innovation.
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        Beta Codex

        Embrace Beta Codex for decentralised, adaptive, and human-centric organisational design. Enable true agility beyond rigid hierarchies.
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        Time to Market

        Time to Market is one of the four key value areas of Evidence‑Based Management that focuses on organizational capability. It is not a single measure but a group of metrics that evaluate the speed at which ideas are transformed into deliverable products or features. This collection of measures may include lead time, cycle time, and overall development duration—providing a comprehensive view of how quickly value reaches the customer.
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        Value Stream Mapping

        Visualising workflows to identify inefficiencies and optimise value delivery.
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          Portfolio Management

          Align strategy with execution through Portfolio Management. Prioritise investments, optimise value streams, and drive organisational agility.
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          Agentic Agility

          Agentic Agility is the ability for humans and AI to take intentional, adaptive action within socio-technical environments, enabling continuous improvement, value delivery, and organisational resilience. It transforms Agile, Scrum, and DevOps from passive execution into deliberate evolution, ensuring agility remains a living capability, not a hollow label.
          Videos

          Empowering Teams to Tailor Their Processes: A Path to True Agility

          Explains why empowering teams to adapt their processes boosts agility, reduces waste, and fosters innovation, using real-world examples and practical steps for organisations.
          Videos

          Transforming Waste into Value: How to Boost ROI with Agile Metrics

          Learn how agile metrics like innovation rate, product index, usage index, and version adoption help identify waste and improve ROI by focusing on value-driven engineering.
          Videos

          Agile is Not New: A Journey Back to the Basics

          Explores Agile’s historical roots, the loss of human connection in business, the impact of competence gaps, and why a return to core Agile principles is needed today.
          Videos

          How to Measure Your Organization's Ability to Improve Value Through Innovation

          Learn how to assess and improve your organisation’s innovation capability using evidence-based management and key metrics like technical debt, innovation rate, and complexity.
          Videos

          Maximising Product Value: The Power of Hypothesis-Driven Engineering

          Explores how hypothesis-driven engineering helps teams maximise product value by testing ideas, measuring outcomes, and learning from failure to guide investment decisions.
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          There is no "do agile" there is only "be agile"

          Discover why true agility is about being, not just doing. Embrace deep organizational change for lasting value in your agile journey. Learn more!
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          My journey into Professional Scrum

          Explore my journey into Professional Scrum and discover how agile practices can transform software development and enhance business agility. Join me!
          Blog

          Does your company culture resemble Survivor?

          Is your company culture a ‘Survivor’ game? Discover how fostering collaboration can enhance agility and team success in your organization.
          Videos

          Why Is It So Important that Senior Leadership Teams are Engaged During an Agile Consulting Engagement?

          Active senior leadership engagement is essential for successful Agile transformation, enabling systemic change, faster adaptation, and organisation-wide alignment.
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          Why is Satya Nadella a better example of agile leadership than Steve Jobs?

          Compares Satya Nadella’s and Steve Jobs’s leadership, highlighting Nadella’s agile approach that fosters innovation, decentralised decision-making, and lasting organisational change.
          Videos

          Navigating Complexity: Why Agile Practices Are Essential for Modern Product Development

          Explains how agile practices help teams manage complexity, adapt to change, and deliver value faster in modern product development, compared to traditional methods.
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          Hiring an Agile Coach: What to Look For in Both Technical and Leadership Engagement

          Learn what qualities to seek in an Agile coach, including technical expertise, business acumen, and the ability to engage both technical teams and leadership for effective transformation.
          Videos

          Navigating Agile Transformation: Empowering Teams for Success in a Rapidly Changing Landscape

          Explores effective Agile transformation by empowering teams, improving collaboration, focusing on value delivery, and fostering continuous improvement in fast-changing environments.
          Videos

          Ditch the Agile Bandit Mentality: How to Prioritise Value Over Estimates for Team Success

          Explores why focusing on value delivery and psychological safety leads to better Agile team outcomes than fixating on estimates, output metrics, or blame culture.
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          The Importance of Patience and Trust in Building Agile Organizations

          Explores how patience and trust foster effective Agile teams, support learning from failure, prevent blame culture, and enable innovation through empiricism and collaboration.
          Videos

          7 harbingers of the Agile apocalypse - Judgement

          Explores how rigid, judgmental Agile practices stifle creativity and innovation, and advocates for principle-driven, adaptable approaches to foster true business agility.
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          Ability to Innovate

          Ability to Innovate is one of the four key value areas of Evidence‑Based Management that gauges organizational capability in terms of innovation. It is composed of a group of measures that assess how effectively an organization generates, implements, and sustains innovative solutions. Rather than a single metric, this group may include indicators like the frequency of experiments, innovation throughput, and learning cycles, offering a broad view of the organization’s capacity to innovate.
          Videos

          Empowering Agile Teams: The Critical Role of User Feedback in Requirement Changes

          Explains how empowering Agile teams to act on user feedback enables rapid requirement changes, improves product relevance, and overcomes barriers like rigid contracts.
          Videos

          Unlocking Agile’s Core: Questioning to Create Value

          Explores how questioning, continuous improvement, and team empowerment drive Agile success, helping organisations adapt quickly, spot inefficiencies, and create lasting value.
          Videos

          What would be an example of a great agile consulting outcome for a client?

          A great agile consulting outcome enables organisations to adapt quickly to change, fostering resilience, decentralised decision-making, and empowered, responsive teams.
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          Unrealised Value

          Unrealized Value is one of the four key value areas of Evidence‑Based Management and represents a group of measures focused on the potential value that could be captured with further improvements. Instead of being a single metric, it includes various indicators that assess untapped opportunities, such as latent market demand or areas for innovation. These combined measures offer insight into how much additional value remains available for the organization.
          Videos

          What more needs to happen before traditional organisations consider Agile?

          Explores what traditional organisations must change—beyond adopting Agile tools—to achieve true agility, cultural transformation, and sustained competitive advantage.
          Guides

          Investing for Business Agility - Using evidence-based portfolio management to achieve better business outcomes

          Discover more about Investing for Business Agility - Using evidence-based portfolio management to achieve better business outcomes and how it can help you in your Agile journey!
          Videos

          Turning User Feedback into Actionable Work: A Guide to Maximizing Product Value

          Learn how to quickly turn user feedback into actionable work items in Agile teams, improving product value through fast feedback loops, prioritisation, and continuous improvement.
          Videos

          Overcoming the Plague of Rigidity: Embracing True Agility in Your Team

          Explores how rigid adherence to tools and processes hinders true agility, and offers strategies for fostering adaptability, experimentation, and continuous improvement in teams.
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          Embracing Change: Why Agile Evolution is the Key to Thriving in a Rapidly Shifting World

          Explores why continuous organisational evolution, not fixed transformations, is essential for adapting to rapid change, fostering agility, and enabling sustainable growth.
          Course

          Professional Agile Leadership - Evidence-Based Management (PAL-EBM)

          Scrum.org created the Evidence-Based Management™ (EBM) framework which is an Agile approach to help leaders guide their teams toward continuously improving customer outcomes, organizational capabilities, and business results. EBM focuses on customer value and intentional experimentation to systematically improve an organization’s performance and achieve its strategic goals.
          Videos

          Empowering Leadership: Driving Cultural Change for Agile Success

          Explores how effective leadership drives cultural change, supports agile practices, and fosters collaboration through vision, automation, learning, and breaking down silos.
          Course

          Professional Agile Leadership Essentials (PAL-e) with Certification

          Professional Agile Leadership (PAL) Essentials is a 14h workshop, delivered over four half-days that provides a foundation of the role that leaders play in creating the conditions for a successful agile transformation.
          Videos

          Scaling Smart: How to Build Sustainable Growth Without the Chaos

          Learn how to achieve sustainable, resilient organisational growth by focusing on simplification, value delivery, and effective agile practices—avoiding chaos as you scale.
          Videos

          Unlocking Unrealised Value: The Key to Elevating Your Product Development Strategy

          Explains how identifying and validating unrealised value, understanding user needs, and rapid feedback loops can enhance product development and maximise user impact.
          Course

          Professional Scrum Product Owner

          Our Professional Scrum Product Owner course helps students master the Product Owner role with real-world scenarios and practical exercises, enabling participants to drive product success using Agile principles and Scrum.
          Videos

          Navigating the Balance: How Lean Governance Can Boost Agility and Innovation in Your Organisation

          Explores how lean governance reduces unnecessary processes, enabling organisations to stay agile, meet compliance, and foster innovation without excess bureaucracy.

          Connect with Martin Hinshelwood

          If you've made it this far, it's worth connecting with our principal consultant and coach, Martin Hinshelwood, for a 30-minute 'ask me anything' call.

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