Business agility is the capability of an organization to adapt quickly to changes in order to deliver value to customers. In a VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) environment, traditional forecasting methods become ineffective, prompting the need for agile practices across various departments. Key strategies for enhancing business agility include creating effective small teams, focusing on customer needs, fostering a learning culture, and promoting autonomous decision-making.

1. SMBA HR Circle
What is business agility?
Tang Tze Chin
Head of Agile Delivery

2. What do these three have in common?

5. We live in a rapidly changing,
uncharted world.
Hic sunt dracones

6. V U C A
Volatility Uncertainty ` Complexity Ambiguity
Past problem solutions
often no longer work in
today’s disruptive
environment, and that it
is increasingly
impossible to factor in
all available information
in decision making.
https://hbr.org/2014/01/what-vuca-really-means-for-you
Disruption renders
market environments
unfamiliar, in that the
rules of the game are
rewritten: what used to
be taken for granted
needs re-thinking.
Disruptive change is
path-breaking, meaning
that future market
conditions can no
longer be reliably
anticipated by
forecasting from data
about the past.
Increasing pace of
change and the ways in
which it invalidates
established business
practices.
Source: http://sbi.sydney.edu.au/answer-vuca-slac-businesses-individuals-cope-disruptive-environments/

7. Last Thoughts…
Page title
Source: Scrum@Scale; HBR May-June 2018

8. What is Business Agility?
Page title
"Business agility is the ability of an organization to sense changes
internally or externally and respond accordingly in order to deliver value to
its customers.”
- Agile Alliance

9. Agile is not just for
technology teams…
• Marketing
• HR
• Manufacturing (it started there…)
• Pharmaceutical
• Finance

10. Customers
How to serve the need of the candidate?
How to keep hirers engaged?
Competition
How to move faster?
How to compete against bigger competitors?
Talent
How to keep our employees engaged?
How to improve our skills and capabilities?
Challenges

11. Solution?

12. Shift to Network of Teams
Source: Steve Denning, Manu Cornet (Cartoon)
• Create an environment for
effective small teams.
• Maximize communication flow
between teams.
• Management enables, not
command & control.

13. Shift to a Product
Organisation
Source: Wikipedia, “Tree Swing Cartoon”
• Put the customer at the
center.
• Focus on meeting customer
needs, not internal
efficiencies.
• Pursue cross-functional
collaboration.

14. Shift to a Learning
Organisation
Source: The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge
• Focus on learning velocity, not
delivery velocity. That is,
better to deliver the RIGHT
thing and not the WRONG
thing right.
• Safe to FAIL environments.
• Deliver outcomes, not
outputs.
• Learn through quick, short
iterations with frequent
feedback.

15. Shift to Highly Aligned,
Autonomous Teams
Source: Henrik Kniberg
• Autonomous teams lead to
quicker, better solutions in the
long-term.
• Reduces overheads and
decision latency.
• Teams close to the customer
knows what’s best for the
customer.

16. Shift to Constrained
Governance
Source: Beyond Budgeting
• Governance exists to allow the
organization to operate safely.
• Promotes high transparency
and visibility to aid better
decision making across the
organization.
• Clear boundaries promote
autonomy at the team level.

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20. SMBA HR Circle
What is business agility?
Tang Tze Chin
Head of Agile Delivery
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/tzetang/
www.agilemalaysia.org