Strategic Planning

Many organisations embarking on an enterprise-wide transformation to agile working, struggle to sustain or scale the benefits they initially achieve. The journey towards agility is a marathon, not a sprint, and it requires continued commitment, at all levels of the organisation, to ensure agile ways of working stick.

The first six to 12 months of introducing agile throughout an organisation will result in visible improvements in speed to market, productivity, efficiency and employee engagement.  

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

You’ve probably heard it said that change is the one constant in business currently, and that’s true, it’s also true for our lives outside of work.

Many people will say they don’t like change, it makes them uncomfortable or it’s something they fear, but if you break things down a little, you’ll find that we all deal with change on a daily basis.

Change has fast become the one constant in businesses today, but can there be a point when too much change is no longer good for business?

If the changes aren’t fully considered, fully implemented and the people are not engaged with the process, then yes.

In 2013 a large London based organisation commenced a two-year transformation programme looking to change everything from their systems, processes, policies, procedures, structures, IT infrastructure and nationwide office locations.

We are far better at planning for the short-term than we are for the long-term.

Think about when you get in the car. If you don’t know where you are going, you tap in the details to a sat-nav system to tell you the route. You might have an advanced system that updates itself to find quicker routes if there is traffic.

You probably know what you’re doing this weekend and maybe even the weekend after. You might even have planned your summer holiday.