New Perspective For Agile in The Digital World
The paradigm of Agile has come about as businesses aimed at increasing revenue, lowering the cost of operations, and enhancing the customer experience. The three objectives are attainable provided the glitches in the software are removed or minimized, product lifecycle shortened, and the time to market accelerated.
Change people’s perspective to change: No matter how many processes you implement and systems you install, if people in right earnest do not back them, they will not function to their optimum capacity. IT professionals should be aligned to the Agile analysis model where development and testing of codes are carried out in sprints. The people (read IT professionals) should be encouraged to finetune the processes and tools to achieve better compliance and outcomes. The incorporation of Agile testing would need the changing of mindsets, organizational models, and management tools.
Such an uncoordinated Agile testing strategy can lead to curious situations – improvement in departmental efficiencies but no impact on the overall cost and customer experience. Hence, the initiatives should be well coordinated to not only achieve corporate objectives but the organizational goal as well. The business to deliver a distinctive customer experience should focus on customer journeys and supporting internal processes. For example, the buying of groceries by customers from an eCommerce store would involve departments such as marketing, payments, IT, and logistics working in unison.
This way, a customer journey should be taken into consideration while devising the initiatives. So, instead of improving existing processes, organizations should focus on delivering the right customer experience. This can be achieved by simplifying processes and journeys to ensure customers are not overwhelmed, and the final touchpoint remains an experience to remember.
No command and control approach: The traditional method of running businesses is linear. In other words, business leaders assume that any change can be managed by staff since the latter is hired to do so. This top-down linear model is mostly guided by the command and control approach, which is not the right way to achieve optimization goals.
However, in the Agile model, individuals cutting across departments and processes create a culture based on feedback and learning. They can quickly adapt to changes that are dictated by environments. Thus, the overall Agile process is more organic and delivers better outcomes with collaboration and sharing.
Management as leaders and not bosses: Instead of the top-down prescriptive approach, the role of control in the Agile setup should be that of an enabler. Consequently, leaders should identify the problem and allow teams to find out the way to solve it. This approach calls for flexibility, inclusivity, and adaptability to deliver business objectives.
Conclusion
To beat the competition and stay on course to achieve success, businesses should adopt the Agile way of operating. The new perspective on Agile would make a greater cohesion among departments, better identification and elimination of process flaws, and faster delivery of products and services.
