Book Image

Enterprise Agility

By : Sunil Mundra
Book Image

Enterprise Agility

By: Sunil Mundra

Overview of this book

The biggest challenge enterprises face today is dealing with fast-paced change in all spheres of business. Enterprise Agility shows how an enterprise can address this challenge head on and thrive in the dynamic environment. Avoiding the mechanistic construction of existing enterprises that focus on predictability and certainty, Enterprise Agility delivers practical advice for responding and adapting to the scale and accelerating pace of disruptive change in the business environment. Agility is a fundamental shift in thinking about how enterprises work to effectively deal with disruptive changes in the business environment. The core belief underlying agility is that enterprises are open and living systems. These living systems, also known as complex adaptive systems (CAS), are ideally suited to deal with change very effectively. Agility is to enterprises what health is to humans. There are some foundational principles that can be broadly applied, but the definition of healthy is very specific to each individual. Enterprise Agility takes a similar approach with regard to agility: it suggests foundational practices to improve the overall health of the body—culture, mindset, and leadership—and the health of its various organs: people, process, governance, structure, technology, and customers. The book also suggests a practical framework to create a plan to enhance agility.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Enterprise Agility
About Packt
Forewords
Endorsements
Contributors
Preface
Other Books You May Enjoy
Index

Inhibitors to agility


The following factors related to processes are the key barriers for enterprises seeking to enhance and sustain agility.

Broken processes

A process is deemed to be broken when it is consistently failing or struggling to fulfil the outcome for which it is designed. Typical symptoms of a broken process include long wait times between activities, which leads to unnecessary delays; the outcome/artefact delivered at the end of the process being of poor quality, which leads to a rework; the process having non-value-added activities (for example, an activity to perform manual testing when it is possible and feasible to automate the testing); and team members circumventing the process to get the work done.

The following are some of the key causes of broken processes:

  • An "expert" designing the process or modifying it, without involving those who execute the process

  • A structure that forces unnecessary hand-offs

  • Lack of shared understanding between the owners of the process and the customers...