Agile manufacturing evolved from Toyota's just-in-time (JIT) concept, expanding into lean manufacturing, cycle time management, time-based competition, and quick-response manufacturing.

Unlike JIT's focus on production systems, agile manufacturing encompasses both factory floor operations and the growing significance of software in the industry. Its prerequisites hinge on robust digital transformation, emphasising software development facilitating seamless interaction among humans, computers, and production machines.

We're diving into a series of Q&A sessions featuring our esteemed colleagues and friends from the region. Here Rebecca Hudson, Enterprise Agile Coach, kicks off our inaugural Q&A series. Join us as we ignite a spirit of knowledge sharing within our agile community in 2024!

The idea for this Q&A session came from a number of organic conversations with colleagues and friends around challenges we were facing in our day-to-day roles. At the heart of so many of these challenges seemed to be issues with agile adoption and maturity. Each challenge had its own flavour.

The main impediment to agile adoption is often the behaviour and mindset of executives and leaders in an organisation. There is a need to understand, embrace, and support agile principles to enable its successful adoption and reap its benefits. Here I’ve covered some of the impediments to a successful adoption of agile, which leaders should tackle when implementing agile ways of working.

As detailed in the excellent HBR article by Darrell Rigby, Jeff Sutherland, and Hirotaka Takeuchi ‘Embracing Agile’, innovation is what agile is all about.

In this article I summarise the six practices Rigby et al discerned through their study and analysis, that are crucial in capitalising on agile’s potential.

We’re at an exciting time of evolution in the Middle East economy. A time when businesses & governments must look to future-proof themselves and their people. Transforming a ‘workforce’ into a future-proofed talent-base fuelled by ongoing investment in upskilling and cross-skilling, can evolve businesses into learning organisations. This creates the right environment for innovation to future-proof companies.