Delivering Real Business Agility – And Keeping It

[Fred Champlain]

I don’t think I’ve spoken to an executive in the last few years who didn’t believe that his or her organization had successfully achieved business agility.  The more aware ones recognized that there was still room to improve, but they pretty much all felt as though they had evolved into an enterprise that was capable of responding quickly and with low levels of disruption when things changed.

But I’m not sure how many of them were as capable as they thought they were.  Sure, things had improved from where those organizations were five years ago, but just because you’re now more maneuverable than an oil tanker doesn’t mean that you can pivot on a dime and head off in a new direction as if nothing had happened.

Business agility, real business agility, is about making the enterprise demonstrably and consistently more successful.  It’s about recognizing when changes in operating environments require a shift in internal focus.  It’s about making the right decisions about that shift.  And it’s about implementing the changes effectively and efficiently while keeping all individuals and teams engaged and aligned.

Achieve that and you can at least keep pace with your competition, and you may well be able to gain a competitive advantage.  You’ll deliver better solutions for your customers, and provide them with the confidence to believe in your ability to continue delivering solutions and capabilities that they need.  And you’ll provide your internal departments and functions with the tools, technologies and ways of working that allow them to optimize performance in a supportive and empowering environment.

But how do organizations achieve that level of business agility?  And then how do they maintain it?  The key is to ensure alignment across the entire enterprise.  When everyone understands what’s important, and how work contributes to success, adapting to change is relatively easy.  That’s where the right technology infrastructure comes in.

ServiceNow SPM (Strategic Portfolio Management) connects strategic priorities with the investments and work that delivers on those priorities.  With intuitive communication capabilities, all teams, and all business areas have a common understanding of what’s important and how their efforts contribute to success.

When something changes, everyone can understand how that change impacts their own work, and can respond appropriately.  Business leaders can adjust priorities, goals and objectives and then communicate those changes to all stakeholders.  Investment owners can redistribute resources to focus on areas that have become more important, replanning to eliminate items that no longer align with organizational needs.

Work teams and project managers can collaborate to adjust their solutions to ensure that they are optimizing their contribution to the new priorities, knowing that SPM’s reporting and analytics capabilities are allowing all stakeholders to understand those changes and validate that the expected improvements are occurring.  Once work is completed, benefits realization allows the value to be measured to validate that goal and objectives have been achieved.

In today’s world, change is inevitable.  No matter how efficient organizations become there will always be a need for adjustments between the approval of plans and the delivery of solutions.  That’s why business agility is such a critical business discipline for modern businesses.  But unless those businesses are leveraging an enterprise tool like ServiceNow SPM, business agility will never reach the level it needs to.