A Lightning Cast is a shorter form episode modeled after lightning talks.  You’ll get valuable content in 8 minutes or less.

As more organizations adopt Agile practices, we can’t forget that the goal isn’t to be Agile.  The goal is to achieve Business Agility.

Business Agility is the ability to rapidly resplnd to change.  I think of Business Agility in three facets:

No mater your title, you have a role to plan in helping your organization create high quality, valuable solutions quickly.

Customer Value

Customer value implies that we’re delivering solutions that are valuable to our customers and are of high quality.  This is about both doing the right thing and doing things right.

To do that, we need to know and understand our customers and their problems.  Get out from behind your desk and speak with your customers.

To find the valuable solutions, we need a discovery process.  Discovery starts with an idea or hypothesis.  Then, design small, cheap experiments to validate or invalidate your hypothesis.  Next, analyze the metrics and data generated from those experiments.

The data may lead you to continue building the solution if your hypothesis is validated.  If you’ve invalidated your hypothesis, you can pivot or move on to something else.  Your analysis may also lead to new hypotheses and things to test.

You can help your organization improve in the area of customer value by developing a lightweight business case to understand expected cost and value.  You can also help by encouraging experimentation and hypothesis driven development.

Time to Market

You may discover and build a valuable solution, but if it takes 2 years to put in production, it may no longer be valuable.  It’s critical that your organization is able to deliver quickly.

You can help your organization accelerate time to market by breaking work down into smaller increments.  This could be phases of delivering the product or features and user stories that can be put in production early.  Can you deliver a minimum viable product (MVP)?  Something you can put in your customer’s hands and get rapid feedback that will allow you to adapt.

You can also ensure that a shared understanding exists within the team.  Misunderstandings, misalignment, and missing information delays delivery.  Creating a shared understanding helps accelerate delivery of the right solution.

Prioritization is another key to rapid delivery.  Uncertainty in priorities or frequently changing priorities inhibits fast time to market.

Innovation

The third facet of Business Agility is innovation.  Without innovation, your organization will become the next Kodak or Blockbuster Video.  Those organizations failed to innovate and disrupt themselves.  As a result, their competitors disrupted them.

To help your organization, encourage experimentation and innovation.  You should also have a system view; both internally and externally.

Understanding your organization’s capabilities and what’s going on in your industry will help you discover new opportunities.

Listen to the full episode to find out more ways you can help your organization achieve Business Agility.

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