Business Agility Isn’t Just for IT: A Whole-Organisation Approach
Agile-Leads has partnered with Agility Arabia to explore how agile ways of working are expanding beyond IT teams. With extensive experience in agile adoption, digital delivery, and business transformation, I joined forces with Agility Arabia to share our perspectives as like-minded leaders on the future of agility.
At the core of this article, we posed a question: Is the focus on scaling agility beyond tech teams increasing or declining?
Over the past three years, we have worked with individuals, teams, and organisations across the UAE and the wider region, in areas well outside traditional Technology or IT functions. This has included working with the Procurement team of a telecoms company, collaborating with the Head of HR for a bank, partnering with management consultants in the Manufacturing industry, and advising leadership teams in banking and property development.
What we’ve observed is that while there is an increasing appetite and awareness of the benefits of business agility practices outside of IT, significant barriers still remain.
We’ve explored several reports and trends from 2022 to 2023, with an eye on the current economic uncertainty in 2024, to better understand how organisations can overcome these barriers and embrace the proven benefits of enterprise-wide agility.
Industry Insights
Digital Transformation as a Key Driver
In the 2022 ‘State of Agile’ report, respondents were asked, "What is driving agile adoption within your organisation?"
“We gave respondents a choice – we asked – were they adopting Agile for the original reason so many companies started Agile – to improve process and deliver efficiencies – or were they adopting Agile practices company-wide for Digital Transformation?”
It was found that 49% applied Agile practices across the entire application delivery lifecycle. Of those, 26% stated that company-wide digital transformation was the main driver of agile adoption, beyond the original reasons of improving processes and delivering efficiencies. This trend was echoed in the 2022 Business Agility Report by the Business Agility Institute (BAI), where 25% of respondents indicated they were transforming more than one business function.
"Organisations who include multiple business units or functions in their business agility journey score significantly higher than those who are limiting their transformation to one business unit; usually Technology."
A 2023 Setback
However, the BAI’s 2023 Business Agility Report marked the first regression in business agility in five years.
“As the global economy weakens, so too does business agility. The industry trend shows organisations turning inward to reduce expenses, deprioritise innovation, and consolidate focus on perceived ‘safe’ bets,” the report states. This shift resulted in a drop from 26% to 18% of organisations reporting transformation across multiple functions.
Collaboration is Crucial
Collaboration also saw a notable decline in 2023, with organisations facing the challenge of maintaining collaborative capabilities amid economic pressures. This reinforced the enduring (and often counterproductive) view of ‘Business’ and ‘Technology’ as distinct entities within an organisation.
Given that technology underpins nearly every business operation, this separation is becoming increasingly outdated. As organisations navigate the need to adapt, replace legacy systems, and engage in internal digital transformation - de-siloing the organisation becomes crucial.
Delivering Business Value
The 2023 BAI report also highlighted that higher-performing organisations were far more likely to report greater customer satisfaction, improved speed to market, achievement of business outcomes, and ultimately, higher revenues.
Key findings from the 2023 BAI Report
These top-performing organisations often share common characteristics, including:
Transforming multiple business functions
Having business agility programmes sponsored at Board of Directors level, with active Leadership involvement in transformation efforts
Dynamically funding work rather than through rigid annual budgets
Adapting strategies at the pace of the market to stay ahead of customer needs
The ability to sense and respond to change quickly and effectively
Scrum and SAFe Remain Dominant
According to the ‘2023 17th Annual State of Agile’ report, Scrum remains the methodology of choice, with the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) continuing to lead at the enterprise level (26%). Interestingly, 22% of respondents reported that they do not follow a prescribed enterprise framework, opting for more tailored approaches.
Our Perspective
Enterprise-level agility requires more than just applying agile practices in IT. From our experience, each business function, including IT, benefits from a tailored approach that considers its unique challenges and opportunities. While Scrum offers a strong foundation, adaptation, ongoing maturity assessments, and continuous learning are crucial to evolving agility across the organisation.
Our Experience of Agility Beyond IT:
Agile Procurement
The Work: Agility Arabia spent six months onsite with a regional telecom company, training, coaching, and assessing agile maturity within the global procurement team, including C-Level leaders. The entire department completed Professional Scrum Master training, achieving certification from Scrum.org. To ensure lasting impact, we provided refresher training and progress analysis to support continuous improvement and sustainable transformation.
Benefits & Practical Application: The agile transformation reduced the timeline for large RFPs by 55%, resulting in substantial annual savings. Thirteen procurement teams progressed to self-managing Scrum teams, delivering faster and at reduced costs through cross-functional collaboration.
Agile HR
The Work: Rebecca, Agile-Leads founder, leveraged Agile HR practices across various teams and roles, including as Executive Delivery Director at a global tech consultancy, aligning performance with OKRs and the industry skills model SFIA. She has worked with two regional banks to provide agile talent acquisition for specialised tech roles such as Senior Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches.
Agility Arabia collaborated with a GCC bank’s senior leader on agile strategies in HR, delivering Leadership training to empower leaders with practical applications in their roles.
Benefits & Practical Application: For a UAE bank, agile talent acquisition expedited hiring cycles, allowing critical tech roles to be filled quickly. Working with a traditional banking HR team to train their leadership helped grow knowledge on the benefits of Agile frameworks such as Scrum, and the need for wider operational transformation.
Agile Manufacturing
The Work: Over the past year, Agile-Leads supported a UAE-based manufacturing consultancy with workshops on Agile Fundamentals, Agile Manufacturing, and Agile HR. This initiative helped shape agile services for manufacturing clients and laid the groundwork for Industry 4.0 solutions to improve production flexibility and operational efficiency.
Benefits & Practical Application: For a major KSA client, Rebecca has consulted on the creation of a cross-functional innovation team utilising AI-driven ERP systems and digital twins to automate production. Her focus has been to localise skills development and build agile expertise, enabling faster, more adaptable production lines.
Conclusion
In today’s fast-paced and uncertain environment, agility must be embraced across the entire organisation, not only for IT. While recent trends show a temporary pullback in some sectors, our experience and industry insights indicate a continuing demand for agile practices beyond traditional tech teams. Procurement, HR, and Manufacturing are all examples where agile methods have delivered substantial improvements in efficiency, adaptability, and customer outcomes.
Despite the current economic headwinds, the focus on whole-organisation agility remains strong among top-performing organisations that prioritise strategic flexibility, customer satisfaction, and collaboration. Moving forward, we believe that agility beyond IT will become a renewed focus, as businesses look to adapt more quickly, innovate, and stay competitive. The future of agility lies in breaking down silos and fostering resilience across all functions, enabling organisations to sense, respond, and thrive in an ever-evolving market landscape.
Question: Have you seen agility extend to other parts of your organisation? What challenges or benefits did you notice?
A Little Disclaimer:
My words are my own. Whilst Chat GPT is an amazing resource to check my grammar, suggest better formatting and provide catchier headlines when my brain fog sets it, it cannot provide verifiable data without substantiation. It cannot replace experience or the passions and inspirations which fuel our professional lives. The data and trends I have included have been substantiated via the sources detailed below. The insights given in this article are based on my +21 years professional experience, my +6 years in senior leadership roles in The UAE and my own wide-ranging research. If this article has resonated with you please feel free to comment and share, feedback is always welcome and appreciated.
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