It’s a new year, and the best part is that it provides a chance for a fresh start, perhaps a recalibration of your business if need be. This is what to note firstly about 2024; it’s a new start and a fresh opportunity to determine the course of your organization’s future.
In addition, 2024 has been branded the year. In 2024, many companies are expected to have adapted to the New Normal. Even more should have set up structures ready to accommodate changes on a global scale, such as adaptation and contingency plans.
As time passes there is a rising demand for businesses to be faster, swifter, and more effective in delivering smarter and more targeted solutions than ever. We see the advent of new technologies that compel the market to be less patient with untidy services, and interestingly, what could be described as untidy or shabby today are creations that may have passed for great in the last half-decade.
This is what makes business agility so critical. It is the ability of a business to adapt rapidly to market demands or changes in the business environment. Business agility is a huge determinant of a business’s success today. As Bill Gates puts it, “Success today requires the agility and drive to constantly rethink, reinvigorate, react and reinvent”. The events of the past two years and even currently unfolding events have taught businesses that the traditional methods of doing business, executing projects, delivering services, and communicating to customers are not entirely effective, in fact, they are in many cases stale.
For businesses to make quick growth changes, communicating, developing, and executing an idea for their market segment requires jet-speed. This of course does not downplay quality. Agility means doing the job fast and doing it well.
Nevertheless, in all honesty, for business agility to be ingrained in a business’ processes and practices, there must be room for a fail-safe environment, which implies that businesses must be willing to make a few mistakes as they implement business agility strategies.
Business agility begins with communication. Communication from the leadership to the rest of the team. It is crucial that the entire leadership and teams are onboard for agility to be embraced in an organization. It demands doing away with traditional silo strategies where each unit focuses only on its purview. An agile system requires cross-functionality such that each unit synergizes towards realizing an urgent goal per a time. This is what defines an agile business and distinguishes it from the upholders of traditional, outdated methods.
In order to compete sustainably in a customer-driven marketplace, an agile business places value provision to the customer at its forefront. It simply prioritizes delivering quality, timely services to the customer above all else, including managing personnel resources. A business can adopt agility into its system, culture, and processes if they are willing and growth-minded; it is a must, in fact, or else they’ll die out sooner or later. You see, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with resource optimization, however, its inefficiency in a volatile market susceptible to radical shifts as we have seen in the past few years is a recipe for business failure.
Most importantly, for a company to become agile, that company has to want to become agile. There are varying levels of business agility and a business must see how much of its structure, systems, and processes need to conform to the agile method, as it doesn’t necessarily require a complete overhaul in every business. A stable system might be necessary to the success of a particular kind of business to a certain degree, but still in response to market demands, a portion of its processes must be made agile. Determining where to draw the line and make requisite changes requires expert eyes to investigate your business in relation to current market realities and develop tailored solutions that will give you an edge in your market segment.
iCentra consultants are just the experts you need to get your business agile and positioned for scaling growth in 2024. The game has changed, and the rules along with it; playing as you used to know will only mean playing in waters that no longer exist. You surely don’t want that! So talk to us today and let’s get your business thriving exponentially in 2024.
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