How do you decide who will work on your organization’s most important projects? If a big tech project needs to get done, who carries the ball? Do you lob it over to IT and hope they’ll have time and resources, or do you build a team based on who has the skills and interest to get it done well?
There’s a new trend emerging in offices all over the world that’s helping organizations drive more productive work: agile. It’s a term borrowed from software development, and many organizations are approaching team building through the lens of agility, with the idea that they can create more responsive, independent teams that can better serve the organization’s needs, both internally and externally.
Ready to jump on the agile train? If so, here’s you can begin the process of building an agile team structure.
What exactly does agile mean anyway?
An agile team is one built to respond quickly to change, whether that’s changing market forces, a problem with a product or new customer demands. These teams are adaptable, not set in stone — think of them as living organisms that can respond to their environment. In other words, an agile team is built to be fast. Often, business is the survival of the swiftest, and agility offers your organization the chance to innovate and even reinvent itself in response to challenges.
So how exactly does this work? Well, teams are formed to address various projects or problems. To do this, agile organizations have to constantly re-evaluate their needs. The management consulting firm McKinsey — an agile organization itself — offers some advice on building an agile organization:
“They regularly evaluate the progress of initiatives and decide whether to ramp them up or shut them down, using standardized, fast resource-allocation processes to shift people, technology, and capital rapidly between initiatives, out of slowing businesses, and into areas of growth. These processes resemble venture capitalist models that use clear metrics to allocate resources to initiatives for specified periods and are subject to regular review.”
Agility isn’t an end goal — it’s a frame of mind that dictates process throughout an organization. It's an iterative state of constant improvement and refinement. The way an agile organization works today isn’t how it will work tomorrow, because the dynamics within and outside the organization are fluid and constantly shifting. Agility means shifting with and in anticipation of changes. In the end, it’s survival of the swiftest.