The advantages of Agile…and agile! 

I hope by now you’re starting to get a good idea of why organizations need to be agile. We’re going to move this on now by looking at why AgileSHIFT is important. 

Organizations often use agile ways of working in their delivery teams. And teams in some business areas – perhaps Finance, HR, Sales or Purchasing – try to be agile, avoid bureaucracy, reduce the level of planning and be more responsive to customer requirements. But it starts getting tough when those teams come into contact with other parts of the organization who expect detailed planning, formally signed-off specifications and a long delivery process. It feels a bit like stepping back in time! 

Often, the more forward-looking team goes back to the way they used to work. They lose the advantage of working in an agile way, but they do it because it’s probably the only way they can get anything done.  

Individuals and stakeholders need to understand their role in changing the way the organization works and maintaining the competitive advantage it has over disruptors and innovators. Every organization is complex and unique. The people, processes, tools and other elements that make them up need to be appropriate for the different areas delivering the work – they need to work in a multimodal way. 

AgileSHIFT encourages an organization to use the best possible ways of working for each team, individual, task, delivery and customer – and these might be different. Teams might use PRINCE2, Scrum or ITIL and this is OK as long as the organization moves as quickly as possible to meet the customer needs, rather than blindly using a ‘one size fits all’ approach.  

Here’s Ady Dike, Principal Agile Learning Consultant at QA sharing her thoughts on how organizations can benefit from multimodal working. 

Multimodal working is about applying the right approach to any given work situation. So, for example, while agile advocates face-to-face communication it recognizes, for instance, that this isn’t practical for all teams. Some organizations work with geographically dispersed teams which means that they have to rely on technology for their teams to collaborate.  

The other thing to bear in mind is that there are currently an untold number of agile practices available and there isn’t a specific role that says a one-size-fits-all approach needs to be applied across the organization. So, it’s not necessary to insist that, for example, a company uses Agile Scrum throughout the entire organization. What is more important is that, across the organization, there is a commitment to applying agile values and principles and, over time, the right way of working will emerge for different teams and this may be that different frameworks or practices may be more appropriate in different business areas. 

Not all tasks require an agile approach. So, for instance in a company that’s looking to extend its workplace would not expect to apply agile necessarily to that exercise. You would expect them to apply significant upfront planning and a waterfall approach may be more suitable. Contrast that with an IT department that is managing a digital project – in that instance you would expect a more experimental, agile and iterative approach to work best. 

So understanding those differences is very important and AgileSHIFT encourages organizations to find the best ways of working for each team.    

The AgileSHIFT framework draws on best practice thinking in Agile approaches to create agility – at enterprise level and at team and individual levels. This creates smaller-scale agility which develops through: 

Before you move on, why not try the Cross-functional and Mixed Teams reflective activity to help you think about multimodal working in your organization.