Agility is a necessity if you want to create usable software in a short time. Therefore IT teams have learnt how to be agile and other teams can learn from them. Chief information officers were forced to develop agile approaches and tools in order to address long delivery cycles. The mckinsey.com website recommends we use them for inspiration.
Speed up your decision-making
Waterfall methodologies are frustratingly slow. Agile techniques such as scrums are much faster; rapid decision-making is their key benefit. The scrum technique means that there are small teams working side by side. Progress updates and problem solving happens every day. Teams are small and work together. Their aim is to produce something new, for example some product or feature, and test it with end users in just two weeks.
How to imitate this approach? People in the relevant positions must actively work together. There will be no more steering committees; now decisions must be quick. Small teams should meet regularly. The pace means that you should focus on fewer objectives and these objectives must be clear. You also need well-defined decision-making rights and risk guidelines.
Reusing assets thanks to standardisation
In IT, reusable systems are critical for efficiency. These are modules, which in fact are chunks of code, that function independently and can be used repeatedly. They are standardised and therefore work together seamlessly.
You can apply the same approach to business processes. Collecting customer data, processing of such data, using it ... all this can be similar to the above-mentioned modules. You can then reuse these modules on other occasions. Employees will be freed from doing the basics over and over again. In other words, they will thus be able to focus on the area of their specialisation, where they can really add some value.
As little complexity as possible
Complexity makes it impossible to be agile. Precisely for this reason, IT teams are decreasing the complexity they face by building on standard platforms and using hubs for connecting systems rather than trying to connect them directly; otherwise the complexity would be enormous and, moreover, new with each new system. You should make lines of accountability simple and assign decision-making rights in your organisation to the lowest possible level. Then everything will be more effective.
-jk-