ENTERPRISE AGILITY

Enterprise Agility is in Trouble

The answer is not more tools and processes, but more simplicity

Photo by Magnet.me on Unsplash

This story is a long read — about 20 minutes. The short version is that agility starts at home, and we’ll never improve our agility if we cannot manage how we engage with the enterprise. More tools and methodologies are leading to collaboration overload and the impact is getting worse.

If we’re serious about enterprise agility, we need to do four things:

1. Control our personal backlog;
2. Create time in our working day;
3. Invest our time savings; and
4. Manage our energy.

Read on to find out more.

Introduction

I recently spent a year learning about learning, and my focus is now on learning about the link between productivity and agility and the need to manage our energy and not our time [1]. When I started my agile journey back in 1993 — before we called it that — there were fewer distractions, fewer meetings, fewer ‘initiatives’ and more time for work. However, as more interruptions have entered our working lives, we’ve tried to accommodate them, and as a result, a working day today feels pretty unproductive.