As with all revolutions just calling yourself an Agile organisation is not enough. After all it takes more than a Muhammad Ali tee-shirt to become light on your feet. Bec Development MD and founder Helen Tiffany examines the business case for Agile.

Originally evolved to speed up software development and reduce time to market, Agile revolutionised ways of working and, as importantly, thinking about and describing work. What may have originated in the geek fiefdom is now transforming how whole organisations tackle everything from team motivation to project backlogs.

And as today’s world dips and yaws in response to yet another wave of economic uncertainties and consumer challenges, Agile take up is growing ever greater.

According to McKinsey, ‘traditional’ organisations are static and siloed, with goals and decisions flowing down their hierarchy from a power base at the top. They are strong and stable but rigid and slow moving. By contrast, Agile organisations develop around a network of teams within a people-centred culture that can reconfigure quickly and seize opportunities.

McKinsey identifies 5 trademarks of Agile organisations:

1. Clear, shared goals
2. Empowered teams
3. Rapid deciding and learning
4. Dynamic people
5. Enabling technology

The joy of the Agile approach is that it can be flexed to meet the needs of specific teams and business units from HR to marketing and all points in between.

Here at Bec Development we have developed 3 workshops are designed to unlock the principles of Agile, how they can be applied to a range of situations and problems and how to begin using them to meet specific challenges or bottle necks.

Workshop 1 – Becoming Agile

This delivers the concepts of Agile in a way that creative, marketing, sales, managers and leaders can relate to, breaks these down into business-critical approaches and hacks and begins to apply them to everyday situations such as:
• project over-runs
• workload backlogs
• meeting overload and top down bottlenecks
• too much thinking and not enough doing
• de-energised teams
• how language can demotivate situations.

Workshop 2 – Agile Challenge Buster

For delegates who’ve completed Becoming Agile and tailored to specific challenges and teams.

Bring your project into the training room and start applying Agile to it:
• Prioritising & chunking.
• Applying storyboard, personas, ideation to get the job done.
• Who does what and why?
• How long is long enough?
• How good is good enough?
• What does finished look like for this particular project?

Workshop 3 – Agile Marketing

This workshop is specifically geared to Agile methodologies that can be used to develop new ways to embed efficiency and foster collaboration across various marketing functions. Delegates learn how to apply these methodologies to real world examples, using hypothesis-driven, test and learn approaches which drive marketing KPIs.

• Keeping to deadlines, avoiding back log and mission creep.
• Using real-time data and insight to continuously iterate and optimise campaigns mid-flight to maximise ROI.
• Creating short, mid and long term plans for how to apply what you’ve learned back in your organisation.
• How to overcome potential cultural and logistical roadblocks.

It is the Bec Development observation that people in none-Agile organisations are often striving for some etherealised and unobtainable vision of perfect and completed rather than something more productive and pragmatic that focuses on “good enough” and “complete enough” so that the team can move on.

Agile teams are also adept a prioritising; breaking projects down into bite-sized actions and only biting off as much as they can chew. Work is completed in a series of iterative, prioritised rounds rather than trying to do everything at once and getting mired in the process.