What is Business Agility and What are its Need For Businesses

Modern business entities face many challenges like changing over to new marketing channels, investment decisions, and the application of new technologies. Globalization allows businesses to trade beyond local and national markets. But they face stiff competition. The past two years have been chaotic. Many have lost their jobs, and some small businesses shut down before business commenced.

But amidst the turmoil, some companies like food delivery chains, eCommerce business entities, pharmaceutical stores, Informatics Technology and consultancy sector, and logistics have done well. When some failed badly, how did the others manage to succeed? The way to the top is by reconsidering marketing and business strategies, security, approach to remote and hybrid working, processes, and security.

They become successful by quickly adapting to the change using business agility as an advantage. That is the only way for businesses to compete and stay on top. Business agility helps business entities organize, focus, and understand all they must do to achieve business targets. Read to know why companies need Business agility. 

What is Business Agility?

Business agility is the cleverness in handling the culture, strategy, governance, and leadership of a business enterprise— to make it worthwhile for those with business-related interests and to engage from diverse and complex environments.

It helps businesses in the modern digital age stand out and lead the industry. These use digital business solutions to quickly respond to changing market trends and opportunities that spring up. Every person working on the project, irrespective of their stream, must learn and use business agility for successful completion.

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The Need to Be Stable and Agile

Organizational agility is the potential of the entire organization to formulate new policies, make quick changes and run successfully in fast-changing, uncertain, and unstable business environments. Irrespective of the turbulence around them, the whole organization will remain stable and work according to agile principles. 

Organizational agility works on two criteria. Firstly, to enable the team to move quickly with the skill to undertake tasks, take decisions fast, be alert, and respond to sudden events. Secondly, it needs stability within the organization. Stability is from those elements in the business that will not change even when other elements undergo a total change. It is the infrastructure or a foundation on which the business leans to elevate itself in times of crisis. 

Business Agility in Startups — Where is the Stability?

Some startups believe in small beginnings and may even start from the porch or garage of the founder's home. Do they have a stable element in their business to be business agile? Probably not. But they can take the founder and co-founders to be the infrastructure. But they cannot continue to be business agile without some stability when they progress. 

How Does Agility Help Businesses?

To understand business agility, let us take the example of a rubber band and elastic. Generally, if you stretch a rubber band, it will stretch to its maximum capacity and snap. But with elastic, it is different. If it stretches as much as it is pulled to stretch, and when you stop pulling it too, it goes back to its original size. That is how business agility works for a business.

During turbulent times it gets worked up, but it has the strength to stand firm without crumbling. And once the storm has passed and the calm descends, it returns to normal. If that is what business agility is, how does it help a business organization? It strengthens it to withstand hard challenges. Just like elastic, it is difficult to work it with force at first, but when it is repeatedly worked on, it becomes flexible. 

Business agility makes the business sturdy that it does fear turbulent times but welcomes them in the hope of getting stronger. That gives them an edge over competitors to make them leaders in the industry.

What is Business Agility SAFe? 

In 2011, the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) was introduced by Dean Leffingwell and Drew Jemilo. They intended to equip better systems and software to organizations to cope with customer needs changes. Before the release of SAFe, the management approach was traditional, whereby software delivery was initiated through management processes. 

But then came the stressful market environment where organizations require speedy responses to survive and uplift their business. They began to feel the need for a new structure to help evolve business solutions and deliver them throughout their organization. Their need gave an opening for SAFe to emerge and become the finest delivery framework globally as the agile practitioners in the world work to better the structure. 

How does SAFe Business Agility Help Business Entities?

If an organization must implement the enterprise-scale agile practice, they must have a set of systematic workflow patterns called Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). The structure has all the information on the agile framework, explaining each team member's role, planning guidelines and manner of work, and the values to stick to.

Organizations align, collaborate and deliver to an extensive number of agile teams using SAFe business agility and work on three parameters:

• Agile Software Development.
• Lean Product Development.
• Systems Thinking.

How Does SAFe Help When a Business is Upscale?

SAFe business agility is for business entities to grow in size. As an organization upscales, SAFe offers the framework that facilitates Agile scaling. 

SAFe offers four configurations for the different scaling levels, and they are as follows:

• Essential SAFe.
• Large Solution SAFe.
• Portfolio SAFe.
• Full SAFe.

Numerous organizations choose the SAFe framework to upscale their agile processes according to agile techniques. The structure is beneficial to the client and the organization. The organization no more works intending to satisfy the customer but works to delight them. The shift in goals has fostered healthy, beneficial, and long-term relationships with their clients. That has increased the demand for agile practitioners. 

Will a SAFe Agile Course Help?

Aspirants who wish to gain in-depth knowledge of agile principles must opt for the SAFe Course. There is a demand for Scrum Masters, and organizations generally hire those with SAFe agile certification. An individual with SAFe agile training is accustomed to the Scrum framework, and they can guide all the team members to follow SAFe principles.

Although getting a job depends on the individual's skills and experiences, a SAFe certification can better your chances of hiring.