Musings about Organization
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What's the fuss about autonomy?
Reading time: 3 min
It’s one of those words that come back over and over again in context of modern delivery approaches and organizational structures. The word seems common enough to mean approximately the same in people’s minds, however I have found that it is often confused for something else. According to Merriamm-Webster, autonomy is the quality or state of being self-governing. This distinguishes it from the term empowerment, which is the state of being empowered to do something. In other words, autonomy is an internal property - it comes from within -, while empowerment comes from someone’s approval.
Autonomous teams make their own decisions, they do it based on their objectives and all the relevant information they have available about the world around them. Empowered teams also are told to do exactly that. However, the scope of their decision making power - sometimes explicit, more often implicit - limits their autonomy significantly and can even shrink should a decision be made that does not align...
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How business agility protects your bottom line by helping you build resilient systems
Reading time: 6 min
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.
How business agility improves culture and aids retention
Reading time: 4 min
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.
How business agility improves your customer alignment
Reading time: 5 min
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.
How Business Agility Increases Revenue
Reading time: 4 min
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
How Business Agility reduces the cost of delivery
Reading time: 4 min
Introducing business agility to an organization can have a lot of benefits to a company's bottom line. It can increase revenue, profitability, and employee retention rates. Among these improvements, one change that can often heavily and rapidly affect a company’s bottom line is reducing the cost of delivery.
Business Agility enables a company to reduce cost of delivery through:
improving its delivery processes
becoming more deliberate with its projects
having a willingness to stop
Business Agility: What it is, and how it can benefit you
Reading time: 3 min
The modern marketplace is constantly evolving. Customers expect a fast return on investment of both their time and money. The complexity of many technology solutions now resides behind easily consumable web interfaces and SaaS services, making it easy to rapidly switch to alternative products. It is easier than ever to “try before you buy”, and if you don’t feel like you are getting the value, try something else. To counter this, consider how introducing Business Agility practices can protect and improve your bottom line.