Don't get hung up on ‘Business Agility’ too much

To quote a currently very popular insight:

“As long as you don’t have your Business Layer under control, it doesn’t matter how agile your teams are.”

And YES, there is some truth in that. But it can turn out to be a logical fallacy.

And that is where I have my beef with the lure of ‘Business Agility’, because a lot of people think, that it is enough to focus on that level now. Not in my experience.

Having the awareness is –as the mathematicians would probably say– necessary but not sufficient.

An organisation is a system of interconnected systems (or services to use the terminology from the Kanban method) and if these underlying systems don’t work then all the ‘business level coordination awareness’ in the world won’t change much about the delivery capability of your organisation.

You can invest as much as you want into power steering (Servolenkung in German) and slip control – as long as your car is sliding sideways on an ice slope with slicks for tyres it actually pays to invest into better tyres before you start fiddling with the higher level elements.

As long as your business analysts don’t know how to quantify a business value, your engineers don’t know how to reliably ship the product, your sales people don’t know about the capabilities of your delivery services (sometimes a.k.a. development teams), or –in short– your teams are still at a low ‘agile’ maturity you won’t be able to steer the business.

The bottom line is:

As long, as your team level maturity is too low, you can improve the business level as much as you want – it won’t make a difference.

Therefore:

The maturity of an organization has to be evolved as a whole. The evolution at team-level, business level and strategic level has to go hand in hand

till next time
  Michael Mahlberg

P.S.: But if you focus on Business Agility alone at least some people in the organization will feel good. For about six to twelve release-cycles. Because –in my experience– that’s how long it usually takes the organization to come to this realization. [That can be up to three years btw...]