To be truly competitive in the digital economy, you must be built to change. Companies across the globe are faced with new competitive threats, changing market dynamics, new technology disruption and evolving customer needs, and the pressure is on for companies to be able to sense and respond to those changes and deliver better products and services to customers, faster. So organizations today are staying ahead of the curve by scaling agile and building agility into everything they do, and extending agile techniques and practices across teams, teams-of-teams, non-IT organizations and even across the business as a whole. This new way of working has huge ramifications for those who will win, and those who will not.
For years, agile teams and organizations have measured success using process metrics – time to market, team throughput and cycle times, improved quality, and better predictability of output. These are important since agile is built on a foundation of continuous improvement: organizations must inspect, learn from, and adapt performance to keep improving practices. Yet, these measurements don’t always indicate the outcome of the work, and whether it’s truly impacting the business.
For example, do you know if your customers are happy? You delivered your product faster, but was it the right product? Do you have the flexibility and agility to capitalize on market opportunities when they arise? Is faster delivery into the market having an impact on your bottom line?
As companies scale from agile projects to agile organizations, we must evolve the way we measure success – from process-based metrics to measuring business outcomes.
As a business leader, team throughput doesn’t often keep me up at night. But the overall success of my organization does. Here are some of the questions I sit with during those occasional late nights:
Are my customers happy?
Whether or not our customers are happy can predict if they will renew or grow their investment in our products or refer and recommend us to other potential customers – ultimately leading to higher overall revenue. One of the key benefits of agile is its focus on securing and implementing timely customer feedback into the development process. A very common way to measure the outcome of that process – customer satisfaction – is via NPS (Net Promoter Score), a measurement of customer experience and improved quality. More often than not, happy customers = higher revenues.
Are we building the right thing?
Using agile practices, delivery teams can easily improve the time it takes to get a product to market, so it’s important to make sure they’re focused on delivering the right products. An important outcome of agility is increased alignment and visibility between the business strategy and the work that is being done. With development and the pace of business moving faster than ever, visibility into all resources and initiatives becomes critical – from business strategy, to investment spending, to work execution. With a single, consolidated view of all work happening across your portfolio, better agility gives leaders greater insights to optimize investment decisions with available budget and resources, while teams can coordinate their delivery to focus on the work that will affect business outcomes the most.
Are my teams engaged, and do they understand our business?
Self-organizing, cross-functional teams are the foundation of successful agile practices. These empowered teams don’t just produce better products and services: they also produce more engaged employees. According to a study by Freeform Dynamics, more than three-fourths of organizations say that agile practices are helping improve satisfaction within development teams.
As companies continue to realize the benefits of agile and expand their agile practices outside of IT and across the business, it’s more important than ever that they also evolve the way they think about success. This means not only focusing on continuous improvement using process metrics and best practices, but also stepping back to identify the business outcomes the company is looking to impact, and tracking progress regularly to ensure they’re moving the needle. By being built to change, companies can ensure that they will also be built to last.
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