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Why Businesses Need Agile Innovation to Survive and Grow

Rise in consumer demands and loyalty are the outcomes of an agile businesses, says Sanjul Vaish, MD at ATCS India.

In an era where digital innovation is the norm, business agility becomes an essential key for all the companies to thrive. Rise in consumer demands and loyalty are the outcomes of an agile businesses as they adapt any change quickly and provide efficiency and outcomes as and when needed.

In most organizations, business agility and innovation go simultaneously. In certain ways, they are mutually reinforcing: innovation enhances agility, and agility increases innovations. If customers prefer to connect with a person for customer support rather than a bot, hence the company should incorporate call or video chat into the next version of its website. Alternatively, if an app allows consumers to register for a loan in just 15 minutes, it will free up time for anyone who used to handle paperwork manually to start expanding their business model.

A crucial component of profitable innovation and business agility is IT Agility. Thousands of companies and IT professionals from across world, and across sectors, and found that technology has unquestionably become invaluable to business success, allowing businesses to succeed and prosper during one of history’s most disruptive periods.By increasing investments in cloud, AI, IoT and many other innovations, companies are now gaining profit five times more than ‘those companies which are not.

To formally put and according to Google, “Pertaining to a method of project management, used particularly for software development, that is defined by the dividing the tasks into short processes and regular assessment and adaptation of plans.”

It’s all about modernizing the way of practicing a business and future-proofing your company against ever-changing internal forces, external rivals, market dynamics, and emerging new technologies. Keeping this in mind, implementing an agile approach to launch innovative projects across the organization would guarantee that all departments involved can quickly switch and deliver value regularly, which is critical for growth and survival in a constantly changing digital environment.

Here are a few factors that show why innovation agility is important in every business –

 Constant flexibility and development

Usually, the projects are generally configured out in advance have no space for changes, the agile method welcomes and often anticipates changes and modifications in the projects. If the team finds new approach working well for the issues, they can try mend the project accordingly at beginning or halfway through. With regular inspections, agile teams research, adapt and evaluate what is happening and what can be improved. It ensures that everyone enhance their expertise as well as identify and apply all learnings to the project at each point.

  1. Cost and business value management

Any new project can only begin after a team has identified the market challenges, goals, and pragmatic use cases. The agile functionality implies scrutinizing each process and ensure that the whole strategy is compatible with and responsive to the goals of the company. It also enables management to plan budget modifications and bringing changes daily without incurring exorbitant costs.

  1. Transparency leads to value delivery 

Higher exposure across the companies is achieved by frequent coordination, contact, and communication between the teams. And this ensures that everyone on the team, from the project manager and the main stakeholders, has access to information about how the project is progressing. Working in teams at productive iterations ensures that as the project continues, innovations are delivered progressively. Running in an agile function means that desirable results are achieved in smaller, more regular bits, rather than waiting up to 6 months for a result that could be daunting to the company.

  1. High quality, low risk 

Quality of the product / services increases when testing and optimization are done from beginning. This detects challenges at initial level and quickly implement necessary changes. Agility promotes teams to embrace innovation and technical excellence effectively which in turn decreases the risk of failure. Ensuring nothing is skipped, and every concern is detected and dealt with at the initial level can be achieved through daily updates, consistent coordination, frequent monitoring, and collaborative input at the end of each process.

  1. Excellent coordination and team morale

Developing a hardworking, high-performing team to achieve desired goals, requires self-management, encouragement of innovation, frequent information sharing, and continuous learning. And one single team of an organization can never be able to accomplish those goals. To achieve their objectives, the company and IT departments must collaborate and have a common vision of the organizational issues that must be addressed. Regular communication, constant coordination, engagement sessions, and continuous stakeholder management are all important aspects of the success of any project.

Organizations are currently at a point, where they may either continue operating business as usual or transform themselves from within. Taking an agile approach to solve issues, promotes continuous innovation and allows organisations to become disruptive market leaders, influencing the future of their respective sectors.

Today, major global companies like Uber, Tinder, Facebook, Amazon, Google, Netflix, and Tata all depend on a cutting-edge, resilient IT infrastructure. Open-source platforms were once viewed as a quick fix for IT agility, and this is still so in some ways. However, using cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), robotic process automation (RPA), IoT, and big data to deliver innovation and resilience without losing quality entails the adoption of cloud computing.

It’s undoubtedly a common technique that will frequently be used when developing new technology, allowing teams to rapidly evaluate and adapt to any unexpected situations or changing objectives. Teams who are actively working long hours to reach arbitrary expectations would eventually lose the desire or time to care for something more than the job at hand, suffocating the development of fresh and creative concepts.

(The author Sanjul Vaish, Managing Director at ATCS (Advanced Technology Consulting Service) India and the views expressed in this article are his own)

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