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

Enablers for enhancing agility


The following factors related to processes can significantly help enterprises to enhance agility. The enablers suggested are primarily derived from the principles of Kanban, which is a means to design, manage, and improve flow systems for knowledge work. [viii]

Optimize for outcomes

A process produces outputs, which should deliver a valuable outcome to the consumer and the enterprise as a whole as well. However, it is not uncommon that despite the output being optimal, the outcome is still unsatisfactory, for example, a restaurant serving burgers has designed and optimized the process for producing burgers with respect to speed, quality, and cost. However, if the customer is not satisfied with the burger then the outcome is poor, despite the outputs being optimal. If the customer finds the burger lacking in taste or the burger is too messy to eat, then despite the burger meeting the criteria of speed, quality, and cost, it has not delivered a valuable outcome...