The brave new world of Agile: Agility beyond frameworks
It is never an easy story with business agility, is it? It took years for people to recognise Agile in the first place as a viable product development/project management methodology or approach outside of the software and the IT realm. “Every business is a software business”, as Watts S. Humphrey, the father of quality in software and CMMI, said two decades ago. The CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, repeats the message: “All companies are software companies now”. Most of the businesses now realise what people in the IT ‘world’ have realised a while ago — in other words, there is not getting around digitisation challenges, IT & business melting into one delivery, value-stream based organisation, calling for complex and large business transformation programmes that simply need agile business practices to remain relevant and alive. Along with this came the great resignation and the big challenges of GenZ and work attraction, retention, purposeful work, workcations and basically the new global agenda of the future of work — and how we will deal with it.
It comes therefore with no surprise that in times when the business world and the management elites are facing a multi-facetted challenge in terms of their business delivery, workforce, innovation and efficiency, strategic positioning and the like, agile mindset, the agile principles of more customer focus, more value — externally and internally to one’s own employees — as well as more satisfaction at work, more streamlined processes and governance, have found more and more traction in the businesses of today. The name of the game is Business Agility, a concept of the enterprise, starting simultaneously from the top — at the management — as well as at the business units and ways of working, to establish a sort of agile DNA throughout the company. While companies have succeeded to mostly implement some sort of agile practices, when it comes to project management and product development, the big hurdle lies in the next step, when agility needs to be scaled beyond the development methodology alone.
Some of these challenges pertain specifically to the Austrian environment, or rather, persist more significantly in Austria than elsewhere. What we saw through our 2021 PMI x PwC Study on State of Agile in Austria is that one of the biggest hurdles for Austrian companies in adopting agility was the cultural one. Agile practices simply did not resonate with the rather traditional Austrian corporate culture. However, before we fully share the insights of our 2023 State of Agile in Austria study, we can unfortunately confirm that the cultural hurdle still persists.
Not all is bad though. What the study as well as the event of Agile Austria 2023 have shown us is that agility managed to find its place in many new companies, exploiting the brave new world of democratic organisations, management-less leadership, attention to stable high-performing teams and employee journey and the satisfaction on those journeys. What, among many other insights, have we learned regarding the impulses for agility in 2023?
Here are the insights:
– Adaptiveorg taught us a few valuable lessons on organisations as adaptive mechanisms, how truly democratic organisations work (imagine self-determined salaries, distributed leadership with no C-level, etc.!);
– Blackshark.ai showed us how a successful agile transformation is done right with a full-scale and step-by-step transformation roadmap and change strategy on an Austrian scale-up;
– Anna Löw took our attention when she shared how Giant Swarm’s P32 made them transition to an ‘on-demand 32h/work-week’ company, besides having some other very progressive employee-centric elements in house — that is in Germany;
– The dynamic duo of Vivienne Parlier & Oana Moraru gave us cool impulses about how to create high-performing and long-lasting teams. We have learned that the 5 languages of love can be a team-building instrument. We have also learned that we can spice up our feedback sessions with ‘feedback walks’ — you know how we all get more creative when showering or moving, right?;
– As proponents of failure culture, we have learned to distinguish between failure which is avoidable, complex and intelligent (something to emphasise for our next PwC fuckup nights!) and how important psychological safety is in our work in order to have truly high-performing people;
– Agile IT Orga of APA Tech and Gerald Lackner’s inspiring take on his AVL DiTest agile makeover with C-suite dailies etc., gave us hope that full agile organisations (and mindset!) can exist and thrive in Austria, which is truly inspiring.
All in all — we came back more confident now than ever that Agile never lost its momentum, if what, it even gained traction — beyond the buzzword and projects — to become an essential element of any progressive management and leadership circles. We are just surprised that it took so long for this pivotal moment to manifest — something we are also very eager to explore pertaining our upcoming 2023 study conducted with the PMI Institute on ‘State of Agile in Austria 2023’ — to see if the same trends get validated with a nation-wide assessment of agility. We are looking forward to the publication and panel discussion at PwC on 21 November — be sure to join in for more insights and deliberations on this topic.
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