Business Agility Transformation Adoption Cycle

The business agility transformation adoption lifecycle segregates organizational employees in agile innovators, early adopters, majority and laggards and one of my main recommendations for the success of any agile transformation is to understand each one’s needs and discover each journey during the adoption so the transformation can be sustained.

Business Agility cannot be designed and implemented without taking in consideration employee´s current needs and how they behave when they hear the word “agile”.

There are people and areas in the organization already experienced in agile (innovators) and it is crucial to discover their approach and co-define with them what business agility means and co-create with them an initial best of breed business agility framework to transform agile processes, agile high performance and collaborative areas, agile products or services in the organization.

The initial framework does not have to be perfect, it should be your business agility MVP. You will have to inspect and adapt the MVP framework during the transformation lifecycle to fit your organizational needs.

Any out-of-box framework (tribe-chapter-squad) will fail if it is not adapted to the agile innovators experience and to what each organization needs.

As an agile coach I have seen the difference of applying design thinking and lean startup techniques in the definition and design of the business agile transformation in the organization.

Once you have defined the business agility purpose and meaning and you have created an initial business agility MVP framework it is time to discover your early adopter processes, areas or products: those where agility makes sense and are opened to change.

You will have the opportunity to work with your early adopters and encourage them to be agile.

You will be able to validate with them if they understand and share the business agility purpose and meaning and if your initial business agility MVP fits for their purpose and their needs.

You can measure the value return or your business agility framework when it is used with the early adopter processes, areas or products: are you able to increase efficiency, improve customer experience, foster business growth, reduce time and cost and instill a collaborative, transparent and safe culture in the teams?

Your challenge will be to validate the framework, adapt it to what they need and achieve outcomes in six months.

You will have to adapt and improve the business agility framework before scaling it to the majority of the organization that does not have so change-opened mind as early adopters have. Majority need validated outcomes to be convinced and start the journey.

One of the main risks I have seen when an organization faces a business agility transformation is to follow a big-bang approach where everyone should be convinced of the need to transform. My second main recommendation for business agility transformation is to follow a progressive adoption lifecycle where you can validate your initial framework and achieve outcomes before facing the organization majority. Success or fail may depend on this.

I would like to finish this brief things-for-thoughts essay saying that story telling is an essential part of any business agility transformation because any company that is living a business agility transformation needs to tell an story

But this is the story for my next article …

Warm regards!