Adapting Business Agility in Teams

In a business or startup, you may have often heard the term agile. However, agile can be interpreted as an attitude, culture and capabilities according to your business needs. Not limited to organizational settings, agility can also be adapted to everyday life.

If applied well, agility can increase productivity and morality. A team with agile characteristics can continue to develop and compete positively in achieving common goals.

Understanding Business Agility

Business agility is defined as the adoption and evolution of values, behaviors and capabilities. This allows a business or individual to be more adaptive, creative and resilient when facing complexity, uncertainty and change. If handled well, value adaptation can lead to better outcomes.

An agile business is an organizational structure that adheres to agile philosophies and values. Starting from the people and culture, to the structure and technology used in building the business. An agile business is basically a customer-oriented business.

The business must be able to respond quickly and effectively to various opportunities and threats found in the internal and external environment. These factors can be commercial, legal, technological, social, moral or political factors.

The Business Agility Framework is designed to help organizations become more adaptive, creative and resilient. Executing projects and business operations in an agile manner is an important part of business agility. This must of course be followed by a strategy and approach that is also agile for the target market or consumers.

Leading an Agile Team

An agile team is excellent for innovation by applying profitable creativity to improve the quality of products and services, processes, or business models. An agile team is a small, multidisciplinary team.

Situations that arise when problems are complex, full of change, and have no clear solution are familiar conditions for an agile team. An equally important condition is close collaboration with consumers so that the team can think creatively to carry out command and control functions.

In an agile situation, a team no longer needs to go through a rigid chain of command. The role of the leader in the team only needs to provide direction to innovate or find a way out. Team members can find a way out by placing responsibility for the solution sought. The team will be more motivated and work faster.

Forming an Agile Team

Leaders play a role in setting priorities and sequencing initiatives. Leaders must consider several criteria including strategic importance, budget constraints, people availability, level of risk, and functional dependencies between teams.

No team is truly agile and ready to start. This means that agile teams cannot be planned in detail and guaranteed success. However, the following things can be done sequentially to form or change a team to have agile characteristics.

1. Focus on key business opportunities with a lot at stake

2. Assign responsibility for certain agreed results

3. Gives confidence to work independently while still being guided by clear decision rights, the right resources, and multidisciplinary expert staff who are passionate about opportunities

4. Commit to implementing agile values, principles and practices

5. Empower teams to collaborate closely with customers

6. Capable of rapid prototyping and rapid feedback loops

7. Have support from senior executives who will overcome obstacles and encourage the adoption of teamwork

Traditional hierarchies can usually accommodate a small number of agile teams spread across the organizational fabric. Conflicts between teams and conventional procedures can be resolved through personal interventions and solutions. However, when a company launches several hundred agile teams, such ad hoc accommodations are no longer possible.

An agile team will continue to put pressure on the front line. Traditionally structured parts of the organization will maintain the status quo. As with any change, there may be skepticism in an agile situation, resulting in resistance that hinders the team's operational routine in finding solutions.

For this reason, leaders must be ready to implement agility as a value and principle that applies throughout the company. This is not limited to teams that are required to have an agile attitude, but also to all team components so that this attitude is adapted as a culture.

The general program The Agile Way in Business designed by Prasmul Eli directs you to be better prepared to implement it. In conditions full of uncertainty, adapting agility in business will prepare your business to be more resilient and able to survive in all situations.