3 Powerful Steps Leaders Can Take Towards Business Agility
You are probably familiar with the importance of agility when it comes to athletes. Skilled running backs stop on a dime and leave defenders gasping for air. Olympic gymnasts backflip on top of a balance beam that barely measures a few inches wide. Their agility is what enables their excellence.
We know what agility means to accomplished athletes, but what does business agility mean? In what ways can leaders encourage the development of agile organizations?
What is Business Agility?
Business agility is the ability to understand and adapt quickly to changes in the market. Expectations for businesses are constantly evolving, and companies must evolve as well in order to compete.
Today’s business process improvements can empower rapid responses to change. Agile organizations are able to respond swiftly to ever-changing customer demands. They improve efficiency through app development and by utilizing cloud-based services.
By using the most advanced business tools, agile organizations are able to stay at the top of their game. Businesses that struggle with agility, on the other hand, risk falling behind.
Why is Business Agility Important?
Business agility has become a leading factor in surviving today’s highly competitive environment and achieving long term success.
The importance of business agility relies on four operating principles:
- Acknowledge the importance of business agility and prioritize it when developing strategies
- Stay ahead of rapidly changing customer demands by adopting innovative technologies
- Work with analytic tools to continuously improve processes optimization
- Deliver efficient communication and quality service by upgrading service platforms
Modern markets require that businesses evolve. By doing so, they can better promote innovation, address complex business challenges, and efficiently complete tasks.
Three Powerful Steps to Achieve Business Agility
Business agility experts have created a myriad of strategies that accommodate changing customer demands. Here are three powerful steps to achieve organizational agility as a leader of your company.
1. Transform Organizational Culture to Embrace Agility
The move towards running an agile organization begins with aligning company culture to future agility. Leaders must be willing to adapt to technological change. Resisting change is common, but failing to adapt has consequences.
You’ll miss out on so many productivity and efficiency benefits that app development, cloud applications, and other agile tools can offer.
As a leader of your company, nurturing a culture to embrace change and reward innovation is the first step. Educate your entire company on how business process automation upgrades will improve their efficiency. Get everyone on the same page so they can also embrace change.
2. Implement Efficient Management and Analytics Tools
The next business agility strategy is to leverage efficient management tools. Business process improvement tools, like Quickbase, result in better management decisions that get to the heart of the operational and financial issues at hand.
You can improve your decision making with accurate data collection and strategic analysis. TrinityDashboards+ allows for easy navigation of reports that educate your business decisions.
3. Transition From a Rigid, Silo-Based Structure to Team-Based Collaboration
Generating quick and innovative ideas requires tapping into the skill sets of your entire team. Everyone involved in the achievement of key metrics should have the ability to collaborate on their goals and strategies.
Gone are the days of long approval procedures and cumbersome organizational structures. By focusing on productivity and strategic evolution, organizations can create the structures that will support business agility.
Trinity Helps Companies Improve Business Agility
Trinity offers support services for improving our customers’ business agility, documented in a number of our case studies. When a business has bottlenecks in their workflows, we come in and provide custom application development so solve their challenges. Atlanta Recycling is a great example of the success of our agile business improvement tools.
Over the course of three years, Atlanta Recycling has increased the amount of recycled materials an average of 25% per year. Although the incredible growth rate boosted the company financially, the inability to manage the large amount of data generated by the increase in the processing rate bogged down company operations.
Key leaders had a difficult time constantly updating changing data requests, which eventually spilled over to impact material buying decisions negatively. After several head scratching months, Atlanta Recycling turned to Trinity for a revamp of how they addressed the significant uptick in data requests.
Trinity produced a Quickbase application that tracked, managed, and reported on the entire work process much more effectively. Atlanta Recycling now uses a Quickbase ERP tracking solution to stay on top of their material management.
Here are the results of Trinity’s business agility program developed for Atlanta Recycling:
- Reduced the number of hours key leaders had to input data by an average of 10 hours per week
- Decreased the number of business analysis tools used to manage the company from five to two, with Quickbase and QuickBooks emerging as the software that helped create a competitive advantage
- Improved business process automation to ensure better decision making that includes reducing the number of data entry errors
- Streamlined payroll by removing the need to hire a specialist that understood both data entry and accurate bookkeeping
Increase Your Agility By Partnering With Trinity
Companies now have more agile business management tools at their disposal than ever before. Contact Trinity today to see how we can help you move your business towards a more agile organization.
Trinity builds amazing cloud solutions and business process improvements, tailored to the unique needs of each client. Flexibility and scalability are integral to these solutions, since Trinity understands that good businesses evolve over time. For over 20 years, Trinity has worked with clients to improve their efficiency, increase service levels, and upgrade their quality of output.