Adaptive Enterprise

Change, both technological and cultural, is occurring at faster rates than ever before and the ability for business to adapt to this change is crucial. In this context, conventional models of business management can fail to keep up with the needs of the modern economy and a different approach is necessary.

A successful business requires Agile Business Management: an approach to business management and corporate governance based on the successful values and processes from the Agile software development movement. Agile, and Agile Business Management, are a series of principles and techniques that focus on business agility as a means of promoting business growth. Ultimately, this is achieved by improving communication, collaboration, continuous delivery and responsiveness to change.

The following are some of the major pillars of adopting such a strategy:

1. Involve customers in every step of the way, throughout the product development and testing lifecycle.

2. Pick, empower and train your staff.

3. Adopt agile methods of just-in-time planning and continuous delivery process. This will allow rapid changes when needed. This entails delivering partial but functional, or minimally viable products to customers to elicit further feedback and, in extreme cases, a major pivot. This apparent irresolution requires a lot of planning and getting many things in order before embarking onto such directed product evolution.

4. Support an open and transparent organizational structure: a shift from the traditional hierarchy towards collaboration and self-empowerment of workforce.