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

Discover why recessions spark a shift towards agile methodologies, enabling organisations to adapt and thrive in turbulent times. Join Martin Hinshelwood!

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

I think it’s a bit deeper than simply exploring agile.

The best time to invest in your marketing, sales efforts, people, and processes is when the world is a deeply troubled place. It’s when things go wrong that you need to explore how best to leverage what you have and align that with value creation for customers.

Agile is simply a great framework and tool to help you do that effectively.

So, it is in times of turmoil that we often discover our deepest opportunities for growth and continuous improvement.

The Agile Conversation

Agile is simply about the ability to adapt and respond to market circumstances and conditions more effectively than your competitors.

It’s about the ability to capture and create value for customers, continuously, in ways that truly delight those customers, which leads to increased customer satisfaction, retention, and acquisition.

If you’re simply looking for a different way of working, agile isn’t the solution for you.

It needs to solve a problem or create an opportunity for you in a way that traditional project management and conventional product development simply can’t match.

Agile helps provide a framework that helps teams identify whether they have the necessary cross-functional skills to deliver a great product, and to be adaptive and responsive to markets, and if not, develop a plan to acquire those skills.

It’s also about deep market learning and customer sensing to focus on producing the most valuable outcomes for customers and the organization. Empirical Process Control is all about learning through data, feedback, and evidence and using that to inform what you will attempt next.

In complex environments, we don’t know what we don’t know.

We don’t know if customers will buy this idea. We don’t know if this concept will work. We don’t know how to build the solution.

Empirical Process Control theory allows us to develop a hypothesis, design a quick and cheap experiment to validate whether the idea is feasible or not, and creates rapid feedback loops that we can use to inform what we should persist with and what we should abandon.

Customers don’t see value in the idea, magic, scrap the project. Customers like the minimum viable product and are prepared to invest in it, great, let’s ship that and improve the product with valuable features in each short, sharp sprint.

Traditional Management

The processes and systems created in the industrial era were designed to slow things down as much as possible. The market moved and evolved very slowly and so the architects of those systems wanted to capture as much time as possible to milk that metaphorical cow.

In many ways, this is why it’s so hard to move with agility in today’s markets.

We are just hamstrung by processes, controls, and a culture of business management that was designed for a hundred years ago.

A time where the manager was the smartest person in the room, and his or her boss was the smartest person in the room above them, and so forth.

Orders flow down the organizational chart and the workers are the ones left to execute exactly as they are told, when they are told, how they are told.

A 21st Century environment works completely differently.

The leadership team may be experts at management and control, but they aren’t the wizards who build solutions or solve complex problems. The people on the ground are those things, and so you want to push decision-making about the problem or solution down to those experts.

You want the most skilled, experienced, and talented minds addressing the problem rather than relying on a hierarchy that has less skills and capability the higher you climb that ladder.

Organizational Change.

In the traditional organization, something needs to be so painful for the people at the coalface that they escalate it to their boss. That, in turn, has to be equally as painful for that manager for them to escalate it to their boss.

And so forth, until finally it reaches the leaders, people who are miles away from customers and markets. If it’s painful and inconvenient enough, you might get a decision to change, which then flows down the hierarchy in the form of an order or policy shift.

It’s slow. It’s painful. It requires a great deal of discomfort before the right decision is made.

In an agile environment, people are deeply engaged in the work they are doing and the problems that they are solving. As they identify an opportunity or threat, they involve leadership teams in recommendations for change supported by a business case for that change, which then results in change.

It’s quick, relatively painless, and helps the team build momentum.

The primary focus of agile is to create products and solutions that truly delight customers in a way that aligns with organizational and team objectives. We come to work because we want to do a great job. We come to work because we have purpose. We come to work to make a difference.

Investing in Agile.

For me, personally, I cant think of a better time to invest in the capability of your people and organization than times of recession and discomfort.

I can’t think of a better way to turn the ship around and evolve into a highly adaptive, responsive organization that thrives in times of uncertainty and complexity.

Empirical Process Control is about developing a theory, and testing whether that theory holds true or not. If it doesn’t, abandon it. If it does, pursue it, and evolve with each learning and production cycle.

Do this with your organization. Develop a hypothesis about what Agile could mean for you. Design an experiment or run a pilot to test whether those assumptions are true, and if they are, persist with the next evolution.

Highlight what isn’t working and develop a plan for addressing those issues. Identify what is working well and build on that success with your next hypothesis.

So, you don’t need to turn the entire organization on a dime.

You can invest in incremental and iterative growth. Small, rapid cycles of change that produce the outcomes you want and help you avoid the outcomes you don’t want.

Simple. Effective. Scientific.

About NKD Agility

Naked Agility is an #agile consultancy that specializes in #scrumtraining, #agilecoaching and #agileconsulting to help teams evolve, integrate, and continuously improve.

We recognize the positive impact that a happy AND inspired workforce can have on customer experience, and we actively help organizations to tap into the power of creative, collaborative, and high-performing teams that is unique to #agile and #scrum environments.

If you are interested in #agiletraining, visit https://nkdagility.com/training/ 

If you have identified the need for #agilecoaching and #agileconsulting, visit https://nkdagility.com/agile-consulting-coaching/ 

We would love to work with you.

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The question is why why might recessions be a great time to re-evaluate our opportunities with agile and I think it’s deeper than that forget the agile story right I think the time when you should be investing the most in marketing from a sales perspective right when you should be investing the most in your people from getting the most out of the out of the people that you have is is when the world’s a troubled place around your organization when you’re when you’re struggling and life is difficult that’s when you should invest more time in the people and the um and and and getting people to understand the markets and add more value to your customers right so so that really brings you back around to that agile conversation right we talk about agile but what is agile really it’s about responding to the market more quickly more quickly that’s not English responding to the market quicker right um so we want to respond to the market quicker and in order to respond to the market quicker we need people with the skills and capability to be able to respond to the market more quickly I did it again with uh um with the the the accountability and to be able to do that right that they are able they feel like they are empowered and to be able to go and go and make the changes necessary because that was that was the thing from from years and years ago um when a lot of the organizational practices were created it it was designed to slow the change in the organization because the markets were slow right you wanted to be able to take advantage of your market for as as long a period as possible because it’s going to exist for a long time so you didn’t want to change the company let’s create some burratic bureaucratic processes to enshrine the way we do things uh push responsibility up the organization rather than down and the people at the top made the decision so the people at the bottom who are closest to the market have to have to realize it has to be painful enough because they don’t actually care about your business right it has to be painful enough that something’s wrong in order for them to tell their boss that that something’s wrong and then painful enough to go all the way up the chain to the top and then eventually a decision is made to do something different and comes all the way back down own um but the time that response comes back down the market hasn’t shifted in the old way but today the market that opportunity’s gone right we we don’t have that opportunity to take it or we’ve lost a bunch of money in the delay it takes to make that decision so so I think um so I can’t think of a better time to invest in the ability capability of your organization to deliver value to your customers the more value you deliver to your customers the more favorable your customers will look because they’re getting a higher return on investment therefore if there is a choice in our highly competitive markets then they’re going to pick you over the competitors that’s that’s how you survive a recession and they don’t because you’re able to more quickly adapt to the market demand and provide your customers with more value so the purpose of agility right is to help companies better respond to changing demand in the market give customers more of what they want and less of what they don’t so yeah that’s perfect time to do that

Empirical Process Control People and Process Business Agility Agile Philosophy Organisational Agility Value Delivery Pragmatic Thinking Agile Strategy Software Development Market Adaptability
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