Is there anything in the enterprise world more divisive than buzzwords? The marmite of the English language, you either love how they can cut through and surmise complicated subjects and processes, or hate them for their ambiguous applications and overuse on social media.
Regardless of your particular position, one of the biggest market shifts that we have seen in this millennia can be captured by one such word: Agility.
Businesses’ ability to change at the drop of a hat was tested in the spring of 2020 through the mass evacuation of the office spaces, as we all took shelter in our homes. Now, as we start to move past the pandemic, the idea of hybrid working has created a new challenge for businesses to answer.
At the heart of the response is change, something that businesses have potentially been reluctant to embrace in the past, but have had their hands forced by the pandemic. Although 2600Hz Product Marketing Associate, Clint Mohs refused to call it the ‘new normal’, he said that the pandemic has demonstrated that the future is unpredictable and that the idea of business agility is to react to changes in the market in a timely manner.
“Although business agility was not a direct response to pandemics, the pandemic created the cultural circumstances for a huge market shift. Business agility is all about evolving in step with the market so that businesses can meet their customers’ ever-changing needs more quickly.”
Moving Past Covid
Naturally, the pandemic is a great example of how businesses need to adapt to changing market conditions. However, business agility also allows service providers, for example, to create new solutions depending on the market.
In order to do this, Mohs said that a new business methodology needs to be put in place. Rather than having rigid steps that different departments go through, systematically signing off their portion of the project without an opportunity for recourse, the agile business model calls for inter-departmental teams to take ownership over the development of their projects.
The model also enables changes to be made during each step of the creation process with Mohs adding that customer feedback can form a large part of the reason why agility is so important.
“One of the fundamental components of the agile model is the dynamic process for developing, engineering, and testing solutions. Rather than saying ‘we haven’t fully tested this, so we can’t go back to the design stage’, if something comes up in testing, they can go back to the design and fix it.
“As a result, businesses are testing throughout the whole process which allows them to adapt to market changes because they are always engaging in this recursive process of designing, engineering, and testing until they settle on the right solution.”
Beating Competition
Being able to adapt to customer demands is also a fruitful business. According to Mohs, backed up by surveys from McKinzie, agile businesses are 40% quicker to market with their products, which means they are 50% more likely to out-perform their competition.
In practice, while traditional businesses are having multiple meetings between executives to cut down their list of ideas from 10 to five, the agile companies are instantly in the design phase, working out problems as they arise.
“As changes in the market occur and customers express a need for something, agile businesses can quickly spin up a product team of engineers and designers to put together a solution fast,” said Mohs.
“That’s because they will have all the pieces in place, so it’s not like turning a huge cog to get something developed”
“Instead, they have people who are used to adapting really fast, who are flexible, have some creative freedom over the decisions they make, so when something new comes along, there is already the process in place to spin up a solution and get a product out quicker.
“Add that to the backdrop of an industry that has a high customer attrition rate where customer churn for telecoms, for example, is over 20%. After a year like 2020, where customers were jumping ship and moving to whoever had the best solution available, in such a competitive industry the time to market argument starts to speak for itself.”
