The cliché that the only constant is change could have been invented for today’s business environment. Continuously emerging technologies, global competition, ever expanding customer expectations, and disruptions caused by everything from regulators to suppliers are prevalent. It seems almost impossible for an organization to commit to a strategy before that strategy has to change.But commit to those strategies you must. Unless organizations have a clear strategic roadmap, they’ll never be able to optimize value for themselves or their clients. So how do you move forward in the midst of so much uncertainty? The key is in the creation of an agile enterprise.
Not all agile organizations are created equal though, and applying agile principles and concepts to more strategic functions of an organization, often referred to as scaling agile, is an essential tool for today’s businesses. However, it’s a lot more complex than simply taking Agile project delivery approaches and concepts and applying them to strategy. It starts with understanding where the organization is today. That can be achieved in a number of different ways, but one of the most effective is the idea of utilizing business capabilities and value streams. This approach involves defining the organization in terms of what it does, and how it creates value and then delivers that value to customers. Understanding these capabilities and value flows provides a context for everything else the organization does – strategic planning, investing, product development and more.
By understanding value streams, organizations identify where those value streams are less than optimal. These are the potential investment areas that the organization can address. Prioritizing those value stream improvements based on the value improvement that can be achieved, the cost of that improvement, and the feasibility of solutions provides an initial strategic plan for the portfolio. With the right software – like ServiceNow’s SPM solution, this proposed portfolio mix can be modeled, analyzed and approved.
Because all of ServiceNow’s solutions operate on the Now platform, the approved work can immediately move to execution seamlessly – across all work structures and approaches. By tying work directly to the value streams that the work supports, teams understand how they are contributing to organizational goals, making it far easier for them to engage and recognize the contribution they are making.
When things in the organization’s external environment change, and they will change, the organization is able to immediately assess how or if those changes impact the value stream. Then, if necessary, they can make further adjustments to ensure that the work being carried out is delivering an optimal flow of value at all times.
This organizational agility approach, with all work continuously being assessed against value streams, helps ensure that strategic agility makes a real difference to the performance of the organization. But it’s not the only way that agility benefits organizations with ServiceNow. In the next blog post, we’ll look at product and work teams and consider how they too benefit.
To learn more about how your adaptive planning can make your organization more agile, check out the ebook here.
