Lightning Cast: Business Agility

In this Lightning Cast, you’ll discover what you can do to help your organization achieve business agility; the ability to quickly adapt to changes and rapidly deliver value. A Lightning Cast is a shorter form episode modeled after lightning talks. You’ll get valuable content in 8 minutes or less. Does your organization have Business Agility? Can they quickly adapt to changing conditions to meet their customer needs? Without Business Agility, your organization will struggle in today’s fast changing environment. What is Business Agility? The concept of Business Agility goes beyond Agile practices. I describe it as the ability to quickly adapt to meet customer needs and provide the right products to customers at the right time. The elements of Business Agility are: Time to market Customer Value Innovation With these three capabilities in place, you get an organization that can quickly deliver solutions that customers need and develop new products to meet future needs. Time to Market With a faster time to market, your organization will have a first mover advantage. You can also increase profits when you consider the time value of money (money or solutions now are more valuable than that same money/solution at a later date). This allows your organization to begin earning revenue sooner. You can help reduce time to market by accelerating requirements discovery. Actions such as breaking down organizational silos, talking directly to customers, and rapid prototyping helps to speed communication and create a shared understanding. The goal is to learn rapidly and move to delivery. Another way to reduce time to market is to accelerate delivery. We can do that by breaking things down into small, valuable, vertically-sliced chunks. We can also define the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and Minimum Marketable Features (MFF) to help prioritize what the team should work on. DevOps practices also accelerate delivery by allowing teams to put solutions into production and into the hands of customers sooner. Customer Value The second element of Business Agility is customer value. This implies that we understand what customers want and what they would find valuable. To find out what’s valuable to our customers, we can work to better understand customers and use some of the approaches from the Lean Startup to test, learn, and adapt. We want to rapidly discover what’s valuable and get it to our customers. Value also implies that we’re delivering with quality. Small chunks of high-quality solutions are better than full-blown solutions with a lot of bugs. To ensure quality, we also need to ensure that our requirements are testable and we consider non-functional requirements. Innovation Even if your organization can quickly deliver solutions that customers currently find valuable, you won’t last long if you don’t experiment to discover products with may be valuable in the future. This is where innovation comes in. To innovate with purpose, we can take a scientific approach by formulating a hypothesis and running small experiments that we can test. Innovating with purpose requires a solid understanding of your customers, the current (and potential future) environment, your organizations capabilities, their competition, and industry trends. The ability see connections between these different dimensions and formulate a hypothesis about what may be valuable in the future leads to better innovation. Listen to the full episode to discover how you can help your organization achieve Business Agility. http://traffic.libsyn.com/masteringbusinessanalysis/MBALC021.mp3 Thank you for listening to the program To get more valuable content to enhance your skills and advance your career, you can subscribe on iTunes and other podcatchers. Also, reviews on iTunes are highly appreciated! I read each review and it helps keep me motivated to continue to bring you valuable content each week. . The post Lightning Cast: Business Agility appeared first on Mastering Business Analysis.