Seven Core Competencies for Business Agility

Let’s explore here the seven core competencies for Business Agility, in SAFe 5 for Lean Enterprises.

Any business/enterprise seeking to change / transform itself significantly, needs to gain some degree of expertise on the seven core “digital-age” competencies for Business Agility, to make progress towards the desired outcomes.

Not surprisingly, we need to start with the foundational competency of Lean-Agile Leadership ! Leadership can make or break the business transformation, subject to the degree to which the leaders themselves can actively “be lean and agile”, “lead by example”, and “lead and sustain change”. And this is needed from leadership at all levels of the organization.
Besides actively leading the change, Leaders needs to focus relentlessly on value, remove impediments to the flow of value, foster intrinsic motivation and psychological safely to create a culture of relentless improvement and innovation.

Next essential competency would be Team and Technical Agility.

At the end of the day, it’s the team who’ll deliver high quality products and solutions to realize the change vision and strategy.

Where the Team and technical agility is shaky and questionable, one cannot expect to achieve Business agility at scale. And in the context of an enterprise, it’s often not just a single team, but the “Team of teams” that’s responsible for delivering the desired results and outcomes, with built-in Quality.

Continuous Learning culture is another essential competency on this journey.

Building new skills and competencies takes time and needs regular reinforcement. Again, this is not just about getting trained, but also about experimenting and applying the skills on-the-job, always looking for opportunities to improve and innovate – not just in one-off hackathon events, but also in the context of day-to-day work.

And in today’s highly disruptive and competitive market, Agile Product delivery is the key competency needed to create products and solutions that are feasible, viable, desirable and sustainable using customer-centric approaches such as Design Thinking.

Developing incrementally, on cadence, with regular integration points and opportunities for inspect and adapt, helps to address the inherent variability in complex product development.

As “one size” may not fit all customers – it’s important to create the right solutions for the right customers, and at the right time to meet the customer or market demands, using DevOps and Continuous Delivery.

Enterprise solutions delivery competency comes to play, for large solutions, cyber-physical systems involving multiple organizations, suppliers, regulatory bodies and so on

e.g. consider the complicated world of financial payment systems

Lean portfolio management competency seeks to align portfolio strategy and execution, by bringing lean and systems thinking approaches to strategy and investment funding, portfolio operations and governance.

Organizational Agility competency seeks to equip people and teams (including non-technical Business teams such as HR, Finance, Legal etc.) in the organization, with lean and agile approaches to optimize business processes (e.g., hiring and on boarding process) and evolve strategy, to better adapt to opportunities and threats.

 

Let’s finally consider an example of a business change, to get an idea on some of the needs to consider and plan to grow the competencies, that help to serve the needs.

Example Change scenario: Consider a mid-size bank, in an emerging market, wanting to go fully online i.e., all the physical bank branch functionality would be available online, so that the bank staff as well as customers won’t need to visit any of the physical bank branches, in-person.
Core Competency	Some of the related questions/concerns
Lean-Agile Leadership	What’s really the vision for this change ? What’s the strategy/approach needed to realize the vision ? What are the steps & skills needed to make progress towards the desired goals and outcomes ? How will leadership drive this change ? How to validate the assumptions ? How to manage the risks ? How's the team morale and confidence ?
Team & Technical agility	What changes are needed to the existing teams, processes, systems,software ? What would need to be built new ? What’s really feasible, in what timeframe ? (without compromising on quality) What’s the available capacity ? What are the assumptions, dependencies, risks ?
Lean Portfolio management	What about funding ? What about the existing ongoing initiatives ? What’s the funding/capacity allocation for online vs. physical branch functionality ?
Agile Product Delivery	What do the customers really need ? What problems will this change solve ? How to deliver high quality solutions, innovations, improvements, in a timely manner, in line with customer demand ? How to enable & equip the customers for this change ?
Enterprise solution delivery	How to comply with regulations around online banking, data privacy, physical documentation ? What about coordinating with partners, suppliers ?
Continuous Learning culture	What new skills can be learned ? What are the innovative approaches for a seamless “online” experience ? What are the opportunities for making continuous improvements ?
Organizational agility	How to hire and onboard talent quickly, to deliver the new solution ? How to manage existing talent who maybe redundant with the closure of physical branches ? How to manage customer support for the “online” branches ?

 

To sum up, for any significant change/transformation to the business, senior Leadership needs to review these core competency areas, and plan to address potential gaps, between the current state, and the desired state. This could be one of the initial objectives for Leadership, when embarking on their business transformation journey.