Operational Agility

Description of Operational Agility. Explanation.

Definition Operational Agility. Description.

Operational Agility is a company's ability or capacity to find and seize opportunities to improve operations and processes, within a focused business model.

Examples of the above opportunities are:

Introduction of new products or services,
Cost reductions,
Quality improvements,
Refinements to logistic processes

Specific organizational capabilities to be operationally agile include (Donald Sull in HBR, February 2009):

Accurate and detailed real-time market data
Focused corporate priorities
Clear performance goals
Control and reward mechanisms

Besides those mentioned by Donald Sull, additional organizational competences to achieve a high degree of operationally agility are:

Flexible HR arrangements (flex working, flex benefits)
Flexible IT systems, Telecom systems, software development (allowing to make changes relatively easy)
Agile project management / change management approaches

Operational Agility Forum (3)

Agile Project and Change Management Approaches
"As in any change project, the affected resources need to be prepared so they can adopt the change. This is more difficult in agile projects as the solution/target is initially not defined precisely, and/or only very close to the time it is deployed.
So there is a need to adapt generic project management approaches and tools that were built around traditional more static environments to these new agile demands.
Any ideas or suggestions?"

Human Agility (Individual Agility) - Response-ability
"The systematic classification by 12manage of agility into strategic, portfolio, organisational & operational is rather good.
My view is that cutting across all levels is the human aspect of agility competency. I would think the following concepts found in Stephen Covey's 7 habits of highly effective people are very appropriate in this topic.
As a human being, people have a choice of how they respond to any experience. Covey calls this "response-ability". To be proactive and initiate response (as opposed to waiting for things to happen), requires 4 cognitive capabilities:
1. Self-awareness - the ability to know oneself and his involvement in any given situation
2. Imagination/vision - the ability to create/visualise the scenario beyond the current reality
3. Conscience - a deep sense of right and wrong
4. Independent will power - the ability to act based on the awareness of oneself.
Note that to be effective, the above capabilities need to be considered for events/conditions that one can control ("circle of influence") versus those we can't control."

Agile IT / Systems / Software Development
"In IT systems, there is a development methodology for agile projects and the goal is to build a system with the minimum elements necessary for building more quickly.
There is also a unified process development methodology that establishes a series of detailed steps very detailed for building the system.
The methodology is very good for ideal situations where there is sufficient staff and resources to carry out each step of the project.
However, in reality, this is not possible. It should be simplified to speed up development.
To do this, it is necessary to define the minimum requirements of the methodology to build the project.
The most important thing is that the selected items are actually useful and not just only create by to do. Otherwise, project construction would last too long to follow every step of the methodology.
In short, agile development means to provide a prompt response, according to customer requirements, using the minimum elements of project construction."

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