What Is Agility?

Agility is the ability to move swiftly and change direction at ease. When we talk about agility in the organisation, we refer to the ability to change direction. Organisational agility is the ability of people who are working together to quickly adapt their collaboration according to changing circumstances.

From where do these changing circumstances come? They might be external to your organisation:

New innovations changes how people can get their needs met, just remember systems development before and after there was a widespread use of mobile phones. New ways of doing business might challenge your way of doing business, just think about how it all of a sudden becomes acceptable to have your internal data handled by an external party with a “cloud”-solution that directly competes with your product. Or it might just be a boom or a bust in the economy that increase or reduce the number of clients and competitors you have.

But there might also be internal insights. This is especially common in software development. We try to understand the people that will use the systems we create. We try to understand, and represent in valid models, the problem domain people operate in. And we try to understand what an optimal solution would look like and what the consequences are when we try to implement it.

As we reach new understandings, our plans and strategies has to change. This will affect our solution designs, and therefore our plans on how we staff, how we work, how much time it will take, and what it has to cost us.

Changes are inevitable, either they have internal or external sources, and we need to have methods in place to make it possible for us to accommodate change. We, as an organisation or a collaboration, need to become agile.

We sometimes talk about agile methods. But we need to keep in mind that it is not the methods that are agile. It is actually the opposite: the methods are often rather strict and rigid. But the methods have the same effect on a collaboration as a exercises has on the body of a dancer or a martial artist: it makes them agile.

Ola Berg är lean/agil-vägvisare med fokus på de lite större sammanhangen: den agila organisationen (vertikalt) och det smidiga värdeflödet tvärs genom organisationen till en mottagare (horisontellt). Hur får vi frihet på arbetet utan att vi själva eller organisationen går sönder?

Ola har under flera år hållit kurser hos Informator kring Agila Metoder