What is an Agile Business Process?

A well-understood strategy has to be built on an effective operational model. The leadership mindset will appreciate the importance of preparedness and, as far as possible, supporting the team to build flexible working practices. 

In particular, with the Covid-19 pandemic and the considerable fallout across global supply chains, it’s considered more important than ever for companies to have ‘agile’ business processes. 

The past few years have shown us we never know what is around the corner! 

The Agile Working Process

An agile business process is a valuable methodology that a company has in place to tackle any unexpected tasks or issues that suddenly rear its head. These circumstances are variable – it could be anything from unforeseen requests, broken equipment, late payments, severe weather disruption, and market changes – the list is endless! 

An agile business process is a flexible management technique that incorporates activities to achieve a goal – but with the ability to make changes on the fly.

How Do We Achieve This?

Team Unity 

It may seem like a difficult task, but ensuring that all teams in the business form a tightly-knit unit with the same overall goals is critical. With employees all on the same page, it’s easier to incorporate agility into the business. After all, it may be cheesy, but teamwork does make the dream work.

Regular Meaningful Meetings And Communication

It’s well-documented that communication and teamwork are the backbones of any successful business. As Steve Jobs once said, “One person never does great things in business. A team of people does them.”  Therefore, it’s essential to have impactful meetings at regular intervals to go over shared goals and to keep communication flowing in the workplace. 

Making sure meetings are impactful takes practice. The content has to be practical, meaningful and insightful. By making the content predominantly visual, it will help keep people engaged and explain complex information to all attendees. 

These regular meetings can be used to discuss any upcoming issues that may require you to change the path you’re currently on. To be valuable, these meetings must get down to the nitty gritty – they should zone in on the conversations that matter.

Inspecting and Adapting

Inspecting a current project after each step is achieved, or at regular intervals, plays a crucial part in an agile business process. If the project needs to be adapted due to external factors, then the team needs to work together to implement the necessary changes.

For agile processes to work, employees need to have an agile mindset and be on board with the fact that plans may change. It’s also important they understand that they can suggest changes to current plans. Everybody is in it together.

A Strong Measurement Process

When your business processes are in various states of adaptation, you must have a robust measurement process to check that each change has made a positive impact.

It may not always be appealing to creative minds within the business, but without factual evidence of the performance of each business process, it is impossible to make meaningful improvements. 

Keeping track of numbers along the way while ensuring process performance is measurable plays a key role in achieving agility. 

After all, if you can’t measure it, then you can’t improve it.

Find out how Group Partners can help your business become more agile.