Disruption challenges norms and reveals new ways to achieve business objectives. In this 2-part article, we’ll examine how to resolve today’s complex IT and business challenges in a climate of economic uncertainty.
Dealing With Disruption
As the year unravels, we find ourselves navigating uncharted waters.
A persistent labour shortage exists in seeming contradiction to mounting layoffs, particularly in the tech sector. Higher-than-usual inflation increases costs while a possible recession looms, the depth and breadth of which are unknown. All while interest rates climb.
Nevertheless, the need to invest in business modernization to be competitive and evolve remains essential. So how to reconcile both?
How does a business attain its modernization objectives, maintain growth, and stay competitive in an adverse and challenging business climate?
It’s well understood that agility offers solutions to IT challenges, but it can also be applied across the entirety of an organization during periods of growth and disruption.
Here are six applications of corporate strategic agility derived from traditional IT agility recommended by The Harvard Business Review1:
- Prioritize speed over perfection
- Prioritize flexibility over planning
- Prioritize diversification and “efficient slack” over optimization
- Prioritize empowerment over hierarchy
- Prioritize learning over blaming
- Prioritize resource modularity and mobility over resource lock-in
Implementation of the principles of IT agility should be tailored more specifically to business needs – doing so in a haphazard way may cause workflow chokepoints and in time counteract the advantages of agility by raising costs, incurring technical debt, and even dissatisfied clients2.
In short, speed should never come at the expense of completing projects and assuring their quality.
It’s time to ask: have you weighed the advantages of adopting agility across your organization to mitigate the effects of disruption?
If not, the time is now.
Disruptive periods are the opportune time to experiment and innovate. Ignoring disruption is ultimately disruptive to an organizations’ success. Agility can help.
The origins of today’s challenges and uncertainties are well understood, their resolution, much less so.
What’s also understood is that the need for business modernization during disruption is not just essential, but that it’s also an opportune time to do it. Disruption challenges norms and reveals new ways to achieve business objectives.
FOR I.T., AGILITY HAS PROVEN TO DEMONSTRATE:
12X FASTER PRIORITY ADJUSTMENT
4X MEASURED PRODUCTIVITY
2X FASTER PROJECT DELIVERY
3X FASTER COST SAVINGS3
(2022 – Bain & Company)
In part 2, we delve into how applying the principles of agility across your organization is the true key to more opportunity and innovation.
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Information for this article were compiled from several sources:
(1-2) https://hbr.org/2021/09/6-principles-to-build-your-companys-strategic-agility
