The world is a dynamic place that thrives on its ability to adapt and change according to the need of the hour. The constant evolution of businesses, societies, and financial cycles concerning changing external dynamics have heralded the onset of different ages. With the current age of software and digitalisation, even giant corporations that used to rule the markets at some point, faded into oblivion when they couldn’t adapt themselves to the changing demands and dynamics of the new world.

Today, when disruptive innovation is the keyword of the decade, your best friend in the field is your business agility - the power to stay relevant. This article briefly discusses the ways to work amidst the evolving marketplace.

Road to Agility - The Story of Roadblocks

Highly agile organisations had around 30% gains in efficiency, customer satisfaction, employee engagement, and operational performance making the organisation 5 to 10 times faster in comparison to its competitors. However, it is only natural that you face hurdles and roadblocks in adopting business agility that make you think twice about whether it will be worth the price to shift away from a traditional business model.

John P. Kottler, one of the brightest minds of this age in the domains of organisational structure and marketing, brilliantly decodes business agility hurdles. His theory is that in this world where the threat of disruptive innovation always looms large over all business houses, most organisations set their foundation as fast paced. In the beginning, they are an adaptive entrepreneurial initiative of a few highly motivated individuals with the fluidity of roles, reporting, prioritising customer needs, seeking best fit avenues, and delivering on promises.

However, with time as the organisation grows, hierarchy grows to scale and a recognised set pattern is adopted firmly as the sole means to deliver with domain specialists working in silos of rigid roles and hierarchies. To get out of this confined business structure, you would first need to look into the major challenges that your organisation would face and the required modifications. The following are the major issues that you encounter while making your business more agile:

Leadership Style

Traditional drivers of a business have been scaling and efficiency. Most business leaders have trained themselves for ages to plan, coordinate, and control organisational structures to optimise resources and maximise productivity.

However, such outdated styles of leadership do more harm than good to your company especially when the need of the hour is continuous learning, innovation, and adaptability. These old oaks of your organisation have contributed enormously for decades to be ignored for good. Yet their lack of flexibility starts costing you the competitive edge you would need to take over the market.

Cultural Change - Bringing the Agile Mindset

Even in this age of machines, it is firmly believed by a major section of the business world that people are the primary asset of any organisation. However, people are the ones who are most resistant to change as it puts them out of their comfort zone.

People who are used to working in traditional work environments are accustomed to rigid bureaucracy, hierarchy, sacrosanct organisational structures, and infallible regulations governing their activity. When placed outside the confines of these well-defined guidelines, people tend to feel lost and somewhere down the line their productivity drops. You cannot instil a new belief system in your employees with an order or instruction to be followed. You need to inculcate it deep within their mannerisms through a rigorous approach where you have to lead by example.

Solutions - Tell me there’s a way out?

The hurdles are pressing but so is the need for your business to survive and thrive. Brilliant minds have worked tirelessly to find the optimal solution to your woes and primarily categorised it into three parts:

• Addressing and responding to employee needs
• Understanding customer needs and expectations
• Surviving the economic turmoil of a crisis

To understand how these are supposed to be dealt with, you would need to do the following:

Performing constant "What If" scenario modelling
Gone are the days of the comfortable ‘As-is’ scenario of an auto-pilot drive of a company. Today, you need to be prepared and have a ‘Plan B’ for every threat you are about to face and every threat that you might not even encounter. Armed with data, your business houses should have an evaluated plan for every potential pathway such as:

• A time scale for its growth
• Exploit and decline stages along with a do-nothing scenario
• Ready to trash even your most beloved and time-tested hypotheses when it starts showing signs of having run their course

Stress - Test Cash Position to identify Liquidity Risks
According to the survey “Making Good Decisions in Bad Times” by Oliver Wyman, more than 75% of corporate finance leaders believed that enhancing liquidity and cash management is among the top three priorities for their company when working to overcome a crisis. For any crisis, your company’s ability to categorically answer the below-given questions goes a long way toward surviving the crisis:

• How much cash do you have?
• What cash can you use and what you cannot?

Your finance strategies should have multiple ‘Rainy-day check’ models. It must be designed with low, medium, and high cash needs and have enough liquidity to fund the exigencies. In today’s world of uncertainty, your ability to access your global cash in times of your needs works as a critical determinant for your survival. Your finance department must be equipped to offer you genuine real-time insights into your cash flow scenario to optimise investment strategies and fund critical situations.

Monitor Vendor Performance, Assess Risk and Pivot to Optimise the Supply Base
In times of crisis, an unhindered supply chain is a boon you will always pray for. However, this blessing doesn’t come overnight. It needs to be assessed, monitored, evaluated and kept ready for such crucial hours. A backup supply plan for every backup supply plan is a key to your survival when your traditional ends get choked.

A mother of survival strategies is that you can never over-emphasise the crucial role of your ability to mobilise and relocate your two most important resources: people and money. Playing them strategically where they are required the most can help in determining whether you stay in the race or retire hurt.

Solution Providers - Who holds the Touchstone?

BeeWorks is a company based out of Pune with over $ 5 Billion worth of reconciled amounts and over 2.8 billion transactions per year. We are a financial service platform provider and a torch bearer to offer you a business agility and transformation solution. We cater to your transition needs with quick and efficient solutions. We cater to your automated commission and payout calculation requirements alongside regular monitoring, scheduling, reporting, and other automated processes.

We, at BeeWorks, help in providing seamless integration business solutions that can enhance your company's capabilities. We can aid in turning your business into an agile powerhouse capable of dealing with almost any disruptive challenge through its multidimensional transition model. Some of our salient features are given below:
We help you to transcend silos into a holistic performing unit free from the confines of the rigidity of roles. A unit with reduced implementation time, higher cost savings and increased productivity in a time of digital transformation.

We aim at building a rapid and robust feedback loop between the decision-makers and developers. This helps you go agile at the team, departmental, and organisational levels. The crown jewel of our model is the laser-sharp focus on customer satisfaction and end-user optimisation through innovation in business models. We can be your most trusted lieutenant with our consistently customised consumer support which allows you to keep your existing hierarchy, management, and system. However, it organises a second virtual business operating system around development value streams to leverage the entrepreneurial network for the most effortless transition using its mixed mode (technical support and human intervention).

You will be offered development value streams, each of which will share one or more agility stages that are self-organising and self-managing. Thus, making daily task direction redundant. Most importantly, this system is time-tested on lean and agile practices known to be flexible enough to organise and reorganise itself quickly without jeopardising the existing systems and hierarchies.

Conclusion

The ongoing business scenario constantly reminds you that you are faced with ever-changing problems that threaten your bottom line. To stay afloat, your solutions need to be as dynamic as your problems. In this world of ‘Fight or Flight’ where the ability to get jobs marks the survival rate of your business, don’t let your lack of agility and adaptability be your shackle around your ankles that stop your business from scaling further heights.

Get the advantage of flexibility by giving your business the much-needed boost of an agile transformation through necessary modifications and allowing it to be future-ready. Let your business function as a holistic modern-day powerhouse unit where growth is the mantra and reap the benefits of this transition.

References

https://resources.workable.com/stories-and-insights/business-agility-during-the-covid-19-crisis

https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/the-impact-of-agility-how-to-shape-your-organization-to-compete

https://www.scaledagileframework.com/business-agility/

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