Agile In the News
Summer is upon us! Many of us are enjoying downtime at home. Although 2020 has not been the ideal year to travel or music festivals – you can still curl up with a tablet and read the latest Agile news. To that end, I’ve complied a reading list for all you Agile enthusiasts and business leaders looking to stay informed about the role Agile practices are playing in today’s business world.
This list consists of a mix of industry articles and podcasts. I hope you find them insightful. Happy reading!
Harvard Business Review: The Agile C-Suite
“To create a truly agile enterprise, the top officers—most, if not all, of the C-suite—must embrace Agile principles too.” This article explores how Agile leadership teams function, how they differ from conventional executive committees and from other Agile teams, and what Agile means for senior executives’ day-to-day work lives.
Forbes: Agile Isn’t New: What’s New Is The C-Suite Embracing It
Complementary to the HBR article mentioned above, this article examines companies with Agile principles at the C-level (Amazon and Microsoft) and those with none (GE and IBM). It discussed what an Agile C-Suite does, how it acts, and how it influences strategy and innovation.
Forbes: 4 Leadership Competencies to Outlast Covid-19
For leaders looking to improve when it comes to managing virtual and remote teams, this article “… reveals that certain qualities such as deep domain expertise, decisiveness, authority and short-term focus are giving way to soft skills, such as humility, adaptability, vision, and constant engagement.”
Forbes: How Agile Turns Risk into Opportunity
In the midst of unprecedented change, many organizations are forced into conducting forced experiments in order to survive – however such risk would be much lower if organizations had the power and know how to “shift on a dime.” This article provides insights into how to think differently in times of change and focus on purpose, value, and crowdsourcing ideas and discusses the core principles of business agility.
PODCAST: MIK + One
Mik Kersten, Founder and CEO of Tasktop and Dean Leffingwell author, entrepreneur, and Co-Founder and Chief Methodologist at Scaled Agile, discuss the importance of having business agility in addition to technical agility, the different types of customers, and understanding why internal customers are just as valuable and important as external ones – and so much more.
Business Agility Critical to Post-Pandemic Workforce and Economic Recovery
According to a new Talent Trends report by Randstad Sourceright, “Organizations that build an agile workforce and make strategic investments in human capital during the coronavirus crisis will be best positioned to gain market share and overtake competitors.” The moral of the story is, the only way to be able to thrive when crisis hits, is to be Agile.
The Pandemic Recession Demands A Digital Response
As companies leapt into adaptive mode – they relied on digital technology to do so. The path forward is to transform and build a foundation for growth. But how? The article suggests focusing on core capabilities and a Lean approach as well as scaling Agile planning and execution across the business.
Final thoughts
As you can see from the different Agile news headlines, Agile practices are not going anywhere. Creating business agility is not just about creating more Agile teams, it’s changing the way the entire organizations thinks, plans, and delivers work – including (and sometimes most importantly) the C-Suite. We know, because we’ve done it ourselves.
If you’re interested in learning more about how Planview can help you with your Agile transformation efforts, I suggest you watch our technology demonstration around Agile Program Management. It shows how the right technology can help you take your biggest priorities and deliver them in an accelerated and predictable way. We also partner with the best coaches in the business to help you adopt an Agile mindset – starting at the top and then across the organization.
