Four success factors for more agility

Companies that want to comprehensively embed agile ways of working in the organization should proceed step by step and not roll out all measures at once in a "big bang". This approach rarely leads to success, as every organization has a different learning curve, culture, workforce and risk appetite. While many large companies have already successfully embarked on the journey to achieve agility, scaling agility still remains a major challenge for a wide range of companies across a wide range of industries. The recent Capgemini Research Institute study "Agile at Scale" shows that culture and existing mindsets, in particular, are the main barriers to achieving agility in companies. In many cases, changes in the necessary technical requirements also move too slowly. The study also underscores that experienced executives are often still stuck in traditional approaches - especially when it comes to reporting and risk management.

Success factors for more agility

The study focuses on the challenges that companies face in implementing enterprise-wide agility. It reveals the obstacles faced even by those companies that have already anchored agility very broadly - i.e., beyond IT or at the program or portfolio level. Four concrete recommendations for action illustrate how agility can be successfully anchored in different teams and how agile ways of working, values, methods and mindsets can be implemented across functions and levels.

1. Experiment: Start with customer-facing initiatives and gradually roll them out across the enterprise: The study makes it clear that in organizations with little experience on the subject of agility, big-bang scaling leads to frustration. This is because it takes time for an agile culture to grow organically. Such organizations become disillusioned and revert to a traditional phase-by-phase approach - which contradicts the core element of Agile - an iterative and learning approach. Organizations should start with initiatives that are closer to the customer - either a leading Customer Journey or Customer Service initiative. Such initiatives should deliver tangible results that are easily marketable, provide a perfect testing ground for Agile, and add significant value - from transforming the customer experience to compressing feedback cycles. However, to build a Lean-Agile mindset, companies need to introduce agile concepts even in areas that are not initially candidates for such measures.
2. Orient: Achieve culture change through behavior change and focus on developing "T-shaped" skills: The study highlights the importance of leadership. Leaders act as role models by showing openness to change, investing in continuous learning, and applying and exemplifying new behaviors. Excessive specialization and silo thinking pose major challenges to the enterprise-wide implementation of agility. Agile teams are "T-shaped": they have defined areas of specialization (the depth), but are adaptable and therefore also able to work on broader aspects of a project (the breadth).
3. Control: Agile portfolio planning and link operations to business strategy:
   • Organizations should focus on strategic portfolio management because an agile world needs to connect business strategy with value creation at different levels of the organization. This is important to optimize performance across the enterprise portfolio.
   • Reshaping funding by moving away from annual cycles: most agile frontrunners no longer have cumbersome annual planning cycles - consisting of approvals, re-approvals, fixed budgets and controls, giving way to adaptive funding.
     Establish a Lean-Agile information center, decentralize decision making, and measure results.
4. Accelerate: Modernizing IT with DevOps and Microservices: Many organizations run Agile and DevOps initiatives separately, only to align them at a later date. It is true that DevOps and agility measures can be carried out independently. But there are clear benefits to linking them in a single transformation process - for example, in terms of faster software releases, cross-team collaboration, and quality improvements. In addition, microservices and agility are a good fit. Microservices enable companies to develop application functionalities or their service components quickly and frequently. This supports high scalability and makes IT systems adaptable to changing business needs.

Dispelling myths

"The myth that agility is an IT method or way of working still persists. However, agility is not a topic that concerns IT alone. After all, it has always been true that product owners should always be located in the business as well. Companies must think about their efforts to become more agile as an organization as a whole from the outset from both the IT and the business side. Ultimately, agility is always about changing the business model, not just introducing a method. Many companies underestimate this effort," says Claudia Crummenerl, Global Practice Lead People and Organization at Capgemini Invent.

Joe Gribb, Head of Enterprise Advice Technology at The Vanguard Group says, "For us, modernizing IT was one of the most important aspects of the journey to agile. Our initial approach was more iterative - we started applying some of the agile principles. At the beginning, we removed the separation that existed among different specialists in IT. After that, we were able to unite everyone - testers, JAVA/UI/COBOL developers - into one team. Focusing on that nuance was the first step in changing the IT architecture to enable agility throughout the organization."

Source and further information: Capgemini