Alongside this, there also appears to be a significant growth in conversations around “business agility”. Which raises the question – “what needs to happen first – business agility or Agile delivery?” “Can businesses be agile without doing Agile?” “Are the two mutually exclusive or interdependent?” “Does doing Agile necessarily lead to an Agile enterprise?”
To answer these questions, it’s worthwhile defining the terms “Agile” and “business agility”. Business agility refers to the “ability of a business system to rapidly respond to change”. Agile practices like Scrum, Kanban, DSDM or XP on the other hand, are a set of tools, techniques and practices which could help achieve business agility. The operative word here is “could”. Success stories around Agile abound and undoubtedly there are many benefits of adopting Agile methods. Sadly, more often than not, these have only been partially successful in bringing about homogenous and sustainable agile transformation in organisations and in achieving greater responsiveness to market and customer needs.
In fact, only 6% of respondents to the world’s largest Agile survey2 reported that Agile practices are enabling greater adaptability to market conditions.
So, if the whole point of adopting Agile methods like Kanban or Scrum is to achieve organisational agility and faster time to market, then why doesn’t it work? The reason is simple. Agile methods like Scrum or Kanban, together with frameworks for scaling Agile like SAFe, are merely means to the end. These methods were primarily developed for the software development sector and although some of their principles may be applied to non-IT functions and projects, they cannot be expected to achieve the same results without making fundamental changes to organisational processes and mindset as well as external environmental factors that form a part of the enterprise’s ecosystem.
“What needs to happen first – business agility or Agile delivery?”
“Can businesses be agile without doing Agile?”
“Are the two mutually exclusive or interdependent?”
“Does doing Agile necessarily lead to an Agile enterprise?”