With the severe impact COVID-19 has had on most businesses during the last several months, many organizations are putting their key transformation and improvement initiatives on hold.  This may be due to uncertainty of the future and the direction of the company, it could be due to changing priorities, but most commonly, it’s due to the financial impact many industries have suffered in 2020. Most organizations want to continue or embark on their transformation efforts but are finding it difficult to do so during this time. If you’re feeling the pain from these circumstances or simply need to free up some OpEx flexibility, allow me to introduce an approach that could help fund some of your transformation work or other key improvement initiatives that will help prepare for and lead future disruption.

Designing a Continuous Improvement Strategy Based on Data

Recently, companies have shifted from reacting to proactively responding to the disruptions COVID-19 created. They’re using these approaches to recover, thrive and move forward: 

In traditional hierarchical organizations, the manager is looked to as the person with all the answers, the Decision Maker, the “Head Honcho”…  As we evolve our ways of working, though, we’re realizing that energized, engaged, and empowered teams consistently deliver more value than those led in a traditional “Command and Control” manner.  For those who haven’t viewed David Marquet’s “Greatness” video, I’d absolutely recommend taking 10 minutes to view it, as he does an amazing job bringing these concepts to life.

Leaders across industries and geographies are continually being asked to “Do More with Less…”.  While this reality isn’t new, it’s definitely not going away anytime soon. The question, then, is how to consistently deliver more value across your teams in sustainable ways…  

The good news is that Agile and Business Agility practices can do just that – help you deliver more value, faster, on a consistent basis. 

Maturing your teams in a distributed, virtual environment to mitigate coronavirus disruption

Key points

• Organizations will increasingly create distributed, virtual teams to mitigate possible disruptions due to the coronavirus epidemic
• Distributed, virtual teams can be high performing, but there are some additional challenges that often need to be solved for

As more and more companies are moving to remote/virtual team collaboration, there is a wealth of strategies we can leverage to shorten learning curves and enhance productivity.

In our recent webinar, participants shared their top suggestions for working remotely:

We had a BIG business problem to solve. Our marketing team’s backlog was massive – everything from the tiniest of tactical needs to the utmost strategic & only a few hands to manage it all. What to do, what to do?

Well, sometimes the easiest way to solve a big hairy problem is to simply block the time & dive on in…hackathon for the business style. We very simply just applied Agile to the business.

Russ Peña, Agile Methodologist, IHG

Russ Peña from IHG (Intercontinental Hotels Group) presented at our EBA Summit how work can be as easy as talking to each other.  In light of “just talking,” IHG uses an “Innovation Center” to give customers–their guests–a seat at the table. 

Evan Campbell, Accenture | SolutionsIQ

At AgilityHealth®’s EBA Summit, Evan Campbell shared an overview of Agile/Lean Finance and how it’s critical to business agility.

Summer Mau, Valmont

Summer shared that onboarding and team success is based on how people hear and process information.