The 5 Trademarks of Agile Organizations

Project management is not as easy as it sounds or used to be. Management is a tough nut to crack for anyone, even if the person is a project manager with experience of 5 years. In the past, things used to be not so complex as they are today as we are exposed to a more digital world today.

In the past, there were techniques like waterfall and others that used to have phases like initialization, planning, execution, monitoring, and closure, which used to be a lengthy and not so result-oriented approach. But now we are more inclined towards agile project management and agile organization. In this latest approach, we divide the project into chunks, and we call them sprints. These sprints are small parts of the project, and as we complete these chunks, we complete the project. Organizations are going towards this approach now, or we should call it a culture as it has an extensive world inside it. There are some trademarks these agile organizations have that are discussed below.

The Five Trademarks of Agile Organizations

An organization cannot become successful until it adapts the changes quickly and makes strategies accordingly. These organizations will always be consumer-centric rather than being profit-centric, and this is one of the main reasons why they become successful. The qualities we mentioned points towards an agile organization.

Now that we are talking about agile organization, there are five trademarks of an agile organization. As there are five, one is about the strategy that is North star embodied across the organization i which there are purpose and vision. The second one is about structure that is a network of empowered teams. The third one is about the process that is the rapid decision and learning cycles. The fourth is about people that are a model of dynamic people to ignite passion. The fifth one is about technology that enables next-generation technology. Let's look in detail at those five trademarks of an agile organization.

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North Star the Vision of Organization – Strategy

It is one of the five trademarks of an agile organization. In this one, we focus on the customer needs in the complete customer satisfaction life cycle. Agile organizations focus on creating value for everyone including employees, partner companies, investors, and others. For that, agile organizations design solutions that are flexible and distributed so that it integrates the external partners in the system as well. There are multiple examples we see in our day to day life, such as supply chain distribution, Uber, Airbnb, Upwork, and many others.

The North Star is a shared vision of agile organizations that focuses on the distributed value model. It is the way for them to make customers feel invested emotionally. It is a catchy point for customers and partners when choosing who to work with. Top-notch companies like Amazon, Virgin, and Gore prioritize the stakeholder focus at the north star and this way they create value.

All the agile organizations that have north star embedded seems to seize the opportunities better. People in these organizations look for a change and try to work it out in the customer's favor. They keep the customer feedback up the shelf and value them the most.

In the making of these result-oriented strategies, there is a big hand of leaders of these agile organizations. As they make these actionable and clear strategies that provide the outcome organization anticipates.  They also make sure that every member of the team is working towards providing value to the customer by taking proper and continuous feedback and making things better accordingly.

Network Of Empowered Teams – Structure

There is always a top-level structure in an agile organization but no traditional hierarchy anymore, as they have replaced it with the network of empowered teams. A network is always better when you need to organize collective efforts for quick results. Leaders need to understand human behavior and human network if they want to build agile organizations like how to maximize their efforts and how to make them work as a team etc.

All the results that an agile organization produces depend on the collective effort of a dense human network that works with expertise, accountability, transparency, and collaboration. All the work and the team management is overlooked by the scrum master in the team. There are some elements on which agile organizations focus that are following.

• The structure of the organization should be the one that shows how the organization is focused on creating value. Like we can make different groups focus on performance that shares the common objective of creating value.
• All the individual roles should be cleared within teams so that people do not get confused and keep their focus on getting the work done than getting confused about their roles in the team. Roles should be defined at the very start and one person can have multiple roles if required. As the most essential role in an agile team is of the scrum master as he is the one who defines other roles. To know more and prepare for this master role, one can enroll in our agile scrum master certification as it prepares you to take the job and do it seamlessly.
• There is always a need to build robust communities with an excessive amount of knowledge that we can use in the development of talent and the sharing of knowledge and experience.
• In agile organizations, there needs to be an ecosystem to create relationships with networks, internal or, external to have the best ideas, develop new products, and generate useful insights.
• Design environments that empower people to perform efficiently and create value through their actions

Rapid Decision and Learning Cycles – Process

Right planning is an essential thing when it comes to going for the desired outcome, and the senior leaders of the organization need to define the plan in detail so that everybody understands it, and it also reduces the risks. The world we are living in is a constantly changing world, and if the organization does not embrace these changes in the best way possible, they will be at risk.

An agile organization has a workflow of rapid thinking and doing that is an effective way to accomplish objectives. Now it is up to them if they deploy the design or not, but lean operations, agile development, continuous action makes an organization works in an agile way.

The rapid cycle of thinking and taking action is the agile way of doing things, and it is different than traditional project management approaches like waterfall and stage-gate. Organizations are now leaving the old strategies of planning and budgeting to move towards agile management. It has significant impacts on the production, this agile model. If a company changes its approach from waterfall to a change adaptive approach like agile, there will be development, deployment, and maintenance enhancement.

Dynamic People’s Team that Ignites Passion in the Organization– People

There needs to be a direction for specific tasks by the leaders if they want to achieve the desired outcome. Effective leaders direct the employees but give them the ownership that builds trust between them and directs the organization towards success.

An agile organization is always people-centric, be it customers or the employees of the organization. When the focus is on the customer and the employees, things go smooth because customer satisfaction creates value for the organization and the employees work towards making the customer satisfied with services.  An organization that works on this culture is always considered to be a developed one. The leaders try to become an architect of the people as they develop them and invest time in them than being a director or a controller. They force nothing on to the employees, and things work smoothly with a common culture of agile.

Next Generation Enabling Technology – Technology

With everything else working in favor of the organization, there is the technology that is also a supporting capability that helps the organization deliver services. It is a core part of an agile organization as the world today is more focused on technology. Now the services organizations offer must be according to the latest technologies, or they have to digitalize the old products with the latest technology.

There are tools based on technologies that help organizations in different things, be it management or production. These software-based tools enable them to work seamlessly. Technologies like cloud computing and data science should be incorporated with an agile culture to make things better than they are. We know how the next generation will be nothing without technology, and any organization that does not operate digitally will go under the woods.

These are the five trademarks of agile organizations as it has become a requirement in today's world for organizations to become more agile. And these trademarks enable organizations to work towards their human capital and customer, that is what creates the value for the organization. That was all from us, thank you!