In the first half of this series, we talked about five benefits you can get from your business agility journey. Now, as we introduced last week, we are switching topics to talk about the first of five aspects that support you in your journey or will be barriers if not overcome. In this article, we’ll be exploring feedback loops, an essential element to business agility.

Big changes come from a series of small changes. Large transformative programs are too disruptive and take too long to produce results. To see the results of your series of small changes, you need feedback loops. Without them, you won’t be able to see if you are going in the right direction and course-correct as you go.

Feedback loops inform you of what is happening in your system of work. They tell your developers the impact of their changes, inform your product team what your customers are looking for, and tell operations where to focus. 

So what makes a “good” feedback loop? 

Over the last few weeks, we’ve talked about five specific benefits that Business Agility can bring to your organization. Among them are:

• Reducing costs

• Increasing revenue

• Improving your alignment

• Improving culture and retention

• Creating resilient systems

While Business Agility brings many benefits, implementing it effectively is a challenge. When adopting Business Agility, businesses are bound to encounter both internal and external challenges.

These challenges must be addressed if you wish to get the most benefits from implementing business agility into your organization. Below we discuss five of these challenges. We have also discussed these on our Definitely, Maybe Agile podcast. Let us take a look at these obstacles, and how to work through them. 

For this fifth article in our series on how business agility can improve your bottom line, we look at how business agility aids building resilient systems. Here business agility practices help by aiding us in looking at risk management for the entire system. Not only ensuring the systems we build respond even when under stress, but helping us build safety into the system.

Business owners tend to underestimate the cost of recruiting and retaining the talent needed to grow. In 2022, it was reported that companies spend an average of over $4,683 and about an eighth of the financial year for recruitment and training per new hire. Recruitment costs can add up, especially if your business has a high turnover rate.

Losing top talent is clearly a cost that businesses have to consider. Perhaps the most immediate impact that losing employees has on an organization is lowering team morale. Employees enjoy having a friend or confidant in the workplace and seeing their colleague leave will weaken their connection to the organization. We saw this in mid-2021 as the “Great Resignation” had millions of employees leaving their jobs in droves. 

Previously, we’ve talked about how business agility can increase your company’s bottom line by:

• lowering costs through improving delivery processes, being more deliberate when choosing projects, as well as reducing churn

• increasing revenue through releasing high-quality products, creating feedback loops, and capitalizing opportunities

Today we'll talk about a third benefit: how business agility can increase your company’s bottom line by improving alignment with its customers. 

The next topic in our series on Business Agility for your bottom line is how the adoption of business agility practices can help increase your revenue. When it comes to building a profitable organization, a key goal is to increase revenue. Business agility helps an organization’s revenue growth in many ways, here are three:

• Put out high-quality products into the market

• Accelerate feedback loops to learn from customers

• Identify opportunities to capitalize on