I came to the conclusion long ago that limits to innovation have less to do with technology or creativity than organizational agility. Inspired individuals can only do so much.”
-Ray Stata
In the English dictionary, agility is defined as the ability to move quickly and easily. Organizational agility means giving organizations, the ability to move quickly and easily, adapting to the one constant, change. Often, organizations employ teams focussed on agility, also known as Agile Innovation Teams. These teams are small, entrepreneurial groups designed to stay close to customers and adapt quickly to changing conditions. These teams achieve higher team productivity and morale and take less time to cater to the market needs.
Companies are extremely competitive, as the life span of any product today is as short as a day. Hence, every organization is on its toes to innovate and improvise on its speed to market. This results in organizations building multiple agile teams, which don’t add lubricity to the internal process flow. They instead are bottlenecked by slow-moving bureaucracies. Agility is a trend and is followed by traditional large and newly established small organizations. But, on the contrary, agility does not suit the needs of every organization. Agility works well in situations with complex problems and changing project requirements. Companies with poor collaboration between operations and innovation cannot become agile.
Any organization aspiring growth and can approach growth dynamically can inject agility in its DNA. Small organizations like start-ups find it easy to improve agility by breaking teams into categories like customer experience and business processes to establish a clear process flow. Every company has pain points, which need to be identified and rectified. This process determines the speed at which organizations can roll out solutions and services into the markets. Agility pushes every organization to rethink its entire talent management system. Companies hence update methods for acquiring, measuring, developing and rewarding employees.
Agility can be a burden to companies if their talent management is poor. The internal talent of a company needs to be rebuilt by aggressively and proactively recruiting with a focus on skillsets for the future, catering to the current needs. Start-ups, in particular, can achieve a lot through agility. Agility welcomes change and encourages cross-departmental collaboration. Feuji being a start-up with a new age ecosystem in its DNA is agile with technology adaptation and talent acquisition. Feuji has workforce for all the needs of the industry today. We believe that lean management is fruitful not just in the manufacturing sector, but in the IT services sector and hence, our process versus people equation is always in an equilibrium.
Agility puts a high emphasis on attention to detail, as projects are chunked into smaller modules. Agility can be tracked on a regular basis with documents like Terms of Reference (ToR) containing clear monthly and quarterly targets. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can also be a great way to decipher the need and utility of agility in organizations.
From a team’s perspective, agility motivates employees with high employee engagement. This creates a sense of accomplishment. From an organizational standpoint, teams can rapidly adjust to changing market fluctuations and customer demands, thus gaining an edge over the competition. Agility pushes out the deliverables fast, giving a chance to release versions of improvement on the solutions already in the market. This strategy improves revenue and creates trust for the product in the market environment. Agility today, is thus dressed in a revamp to persuade the most important asset, The Customer!
