Agile

To remain competitive in the modern era, staying still and simply functioning is practically prehistoric. Businesses must be efficient and ahead of the curve, which can be done in a number of ways, one of which is through implementing a culture of Continuous Improvement (CI). Firms are competitive, not by their product/service, location or process, but by what it knows about how it behaves in various situations and understanding how to improve the efficiency of this behaviour. CI provides this knowledge and allows an organisation to constantly act on this knowledge.

Large corporates are, at best, 30% efficient in delivering change. From launching a loan product to landing a new bakery range on a supermarket shelf, big organisations are failing to deliver change at pace and realise value from it.

One leading credit card provider told us they’d last delivered a major new product eight years ago. ‘We were the leader in the market,' said the project manager. 'However, others have caught up and now we’re struggling to respond.’

'It takes us two years to do what our competitors can do in two months.' MD - FTSE100 organisation

In today’s complex, interconnected and rapidly changing environment, it is more important than ever that organisations can respond quickly whilst still achieving efficiencies of scale. A key enabler of this is having the right organisational design, and recognising that the design of yesterday (designed for efficiency and assuming predictable patterns) will no longer work in the digital age, where agility and speed of response is key.

Matrix working – please click to enlarge the image

I tend to say I’m a Designer by trade, but a Change Manager by heart. But I also add that it’s all the same, and here’s why.

Of course, it does matter what you design. Whether you’re in Product design, UX-design, Business Design or Organization Design, requires different skills and experiences. However, I do believe that they all require a similar mindset.

The existence of contrasting ways of managing people - agile and traditional top-down leadership - creates divergent experiences for employees, also sending mixed messages about what the organisation values. The case for all leaders becoming more agile in their thinking and actions ahead of changing structure in any part of an organisation, when introducing agile ways of working.

Agile is a word always on the lips of digital business leaders.  It’s the way to be if you are working in digital and has set the popular standard as the recent way to work.  This isn’t the first time a methodology has grabbed the business world so completely –  after all the world of business does like its new ways of working.

When I started working as a management consultant, the industry had different buzzwords. We were TQM, Balanced Scorecard and Lean.  We had our core ways of being, all helpfully documented in books we could buy out at the airport.

Much has been written about current middle management roles becoming increasingly irrelevant,ANZ's Digital Chief Maile Carnegie a few months ago famously referring to the 'frozen middle' who "have graduated from doing to managing and basically bossing other people around and shuffling Powerpoints", who also "resist change like death." Carnegie highlighting the importance of distributed leadership and del

The Retail Banking industry is under immense pressure. Disruption from Fintech, a history of misselling scandals undermining customer trust, ever new regulation and internal costs that keep rising while employee engagement remains low.

To combat the rising tides, most banks try a combination of heavy investment in technology, internal restructuring, closing branches, and automating activities to reduce costs.

The results are a mixed bag.

In 2012, the renowned management guru and business book author Steve Denning wrote an article entitled “The Case Against Agile" which had almost 80,000 views and caused a lot of debate in management circles.

Here, Denning debunked the top ten objections put forward by organisations as to why Agile cannot possibly work for them.

Digital Transformation is everywhere and can become a bit of a minefield of jargon and terminology, from AI to Analytics, and IoT to Ransomware, technical terminology can be confusing and as a business transformation leader, you need to understand the potential technology can provide for your organisation.

If you find yourself in over your head confusing your RPA with your BPM, our partner IQPC have provided a glossary of technology-focused terms to help organisations understand their opportunities and the terms that are trending amongst digital transformation.