We knew how the agile process works, and we know who is involved and the tools and the techniques associated with agile, and that's how we do agile. But what does it mean to be agile? What is an agile organization? Remember, we discussed that agile is not only a process, but it's a mindset as well. What is that mindset and how can it be scaled not only just in your projects and your product releases, but across your entire organization. In this video, we'll discuss the agile organization. If you look online, everyone has their own definition of what it means to be an agile organization. Most of them focus on being people-centric or the team. Others discuss the process of agile and creating value for the customer. I like the simple definition of an agile organization. The agile organization is one that embraces the values of agile and practices the principles of the agile manifesto within the company. Recalling the agile manifesto, it puts people first and results ahead of process. I think it incorporates all of the various definitions of agile organizations out there. You just have to understand the manifestos, values, and principles, which you already do. Let's look at the project management institute's definition of agile and of agility. This was published in there 2017 pulse of the profession report called achieving greater agility. The people and process drivers that accelerate results. It defines agile as a mindset based on a set of key values and principles designed to better enable collaborative work and deliver continuous value through a people-first orientation. This implies that agile corporations are following a process that adapts to change quickly. It is also results-focused and driven. It defines agility as the capacity to quickly sense and adapt to external and internal changes to deliver relevant results in a productive and cost-effective manner. It really is encompassing the things that we have read in the manifesto. In order to create more agile organizations, it's important to address three key areas. These are corporate strategy, the organizational structure, and leadership. First it's important to develop a corporate strategy that is adaptable to rapidly changing markets. As a company, you are consistently searching for opportunity through change, then exploiting that opportunity. Setting the strategy and the vision that the entire corporation can buy into creates a culture of being nimble and of being agile. Next, agile corporations or organizations are organized to react quickly to these opportunities. Setting up team structures that are more flat and they're more distributed allows those teams to better share best practices and provide for a more transparent communication system across the entire organization. Agile organizations also have self-managed teams or self-organized teams that work together over time and hold each other accountable and sharing their successes. Finally, agile organizations embody distributed leadership model that reflects the principles of servant leadership. We'll dive deeper into that in the next module. We've learned that agile methodologies prefer face-to-face communication throughout this class or this course, and it prefers in the room meetings and product development. But we all know the world is changing and it's changing pretty rapidly. What has the effects of these mass lockdowns and the acceptance of remote working doing to shift the paradigm of the in-person agile to incorporate more distributed or remote models, has remote working hampered the adoption of agile methodologies across the world. The short answer is no. Through the use of technology, teams are able to connect in real time, and they use many chat tools, virtual meeting spaces, open meeting rooms, and other project management software to connect and recreate that face to face communication that Agile is stressing as important. Let's take a look at companies experiences with Agile over the past few years. This data is from a website called digital AI, and it was published in 2022, and it shows that companies have been quick to adapt Agile even through times that many view as challenging to collaborate. What the graph on the left is showing that 94 percent of all of the respondents from the survey said that their company practices Agile. What's really interesting is that 29 percent of those companies began implementing Agile, started Agile in 2020 and then 2021 at a time where online collaboration was the norm. On the right-hand side of the slide, the data show that Agile isn't only for software development teams. Over half of all the companies have adopted Agile practices for other functions. It's interesting to know that 29 percent of all of operations teams have adopted Agile, while 17 percent of marketing teams, 16 percent of human resources departments, and even 11 percent of sales teams use Agile practices. Also from the same study, it was looking at Agile teams and working remotely. Remember, most of the respondents from this study were using Agile methodologies. What it's showing here is that planning to move forward. Let's start on the upper left-hand side 16 percent in the gray there said that of those teams, they were already working remote before 2020 and will continue to work remote moving forward, 25 percent went remote at the beginning of the pandemic and will continue to remain remote moving forward, 56 percent of all of the respondents from the study said their teams will work in a hybrid remote function. Sometimes remote and sometimes going into the office. What's really interesting and telling is that only three percent of all of the respondents say that they plan to return to the office full-time. It looks like remote work and Agile will be the preferred method moving forward. The report also asked respondents about some of the challenges they have had while implementing Agile within their organizations, and some of the common challenges were, first, the corporate policies don't support Agile practices, and this included inconsistencies among departments, differences between and among teams and structures across the organization. Secondly, some noted that many companies are reluctant to implement broad changes that would better support Agile practices, and a lot of companies and corporations are resistant to change, and that really doesn't support an Agile organization. That was also mentioned of a lack of training in Agile practices and principles, and finally, many respondents cited the absence of leadership in Agile transformation, and we all know it takes an entire organization to implement Agile, and if there isn't that servant leader attitude at the top or anywhere within an organization, it's difficult to scale across your entire company. We know Agile is a mindset. Agile teams certainly embody this mindset. But how do we scale to the entire organization? Truly Agile organizations incorporate the values and the principles of Agile in setting their strategy. They incorporate Agile into their organizational structures. They also embody servant and shared leadership at every level in the organization.
