Although agile tools and techniques are part of agility, they do not automatically bring success to your company. For these tools to develop their full potential in a company, you need people who know how to use them and room for manoeuvre that makes this possible. In addition to agile tools, you also need people and an organisation.
Agility on 3 levels
These three dimensions – people, organisation and tools – are enormously important for the success of agility. They are strongly interrelated and, ideally, changes take place in parallel and in harmony in these three dimensions as well as in the subordinate levels.
1. people as individuals and teams for more agility
The most important thing is the person. Let’s take a look at this dimension at the individual, team and leadership levels: As an individual, people in an agile environment should subordinate their personal goals to the team goals. They should be prepared to constantly learn more and tackle problems on their own initiative. Ideally, the agile employee is an expert in at least one area and also has a solid breadth of knowledge.
This brings us to the team field of action. After all, it is helpful for an agile team if the team members complement each other in terms of their potential and profiles. The team should therefore be interdisciplinary, cross-functional and diverse. In an agile team, there are only flat hierarchies or none at all. Responsibility is shared and there is constant dialogue.
Managers should put themselves at the service of the team. And ideally, the team should comprise no more than seven employees in order to work flexibly and productively. Software legend Lawrence Putnam found this out in 1997 when he analysed 491 projects. According to this, the amount of work required to realise a project increases dramatically from the ninth team member onwards. A team of up to seven people only needed 25 per cent of the working time that a team of up to twenty people needed to complete the same work.
2. your company
Do you want to bring agility to your company? Then we come to the second dimension: the organisation. This is primarily about the corporate culture. The aim is to replace control with trust, break down hierarchical barriers and promote independent action. But this requires patience. An organisation cannot be restructured overnight. New structures must be given the chance to unfold their positive effect.
3. tools for more agility
The same applies to the third dimension: the tools. Each organisation must find out for itself what works best under its own conditions. After all, the toolbox is full: it ranges from design thinking to scrum.
At the centre of the three dimensions is the common core: the agile mindset.
