Article : Start your Business –How to build an agile business
How to build an agile business
Starting an agile business is an exciting
time, full of challenges, learning and
opportunity. Many succeed but many
fail too, being agile in business is vital to
giving your business the best chance of
success.
In the tech start up sector there is a
popular method used as a product
development and business management
tool kit know as agile. It’s a
methodology that aims to maximise
profit, deliver value and help you to
enjoy the journey of shaping and
building a successful business. In many
ways the method is a mind set and way
to help you to approach and form your
new agile business.
When launching an agile business and
developing new products we face an
environment of extreme uncertainty and
constant change with disruptive and fast
moving markets. Being agile helps to
navigate and guide you along this
journey and find the best path to
creating a sustainable and scalable
business model.
Agile isn’t just for tech businesses, any
business can use agile to springboard
their growth as a start up by ensuring
they have an agile culture that embraces
change and adapts to it, turning
uncertainty into opportunity.
Here are some ways agile can help you
to build an agile business
Get your idea out of your head
Visualising our work is incredibly
powerful for getting things out of our
heads and seeing things from a different
perspective. Like many find ‘saying it
out loud’ is a powerful way of thinking
through and rationalising your thoughts
and the reality of situations, agile
mapping techniques have a similar
effect. Visualising the goals, plans and
work in progress when you start your
business helps to provide clarity and
focus, it you a clearer sight of what’s
happening to find the best way forward.
Get some sticky notes and get all your
thoughts, to dos and ideas out of you
head so you can see them and free up
your headspace. Use agile to organise
and structure them and help you to
identify the priorities and the order of
things.
Agile roadmaps and business models
are a great way to visualise, map out
and share the big picture of what’s
happening in your business as you begin
to grow. Agile information dashboards
provide a real-time, tactile tool that you
enables you to keep sight of everything
and capture your ideas. Agile is a great
tool for sharing and collaborating, when
you start to recruit and for talking to
your partners, clients and associates you
will be able to easily show them what is
happening and your vision for now and
the future.
Find the 20% of your work
that delivers 80% of the
value
When a business is growing, changing
and developing there are lots of options
and not everything that we want to do
can be done, we have to make difficult
choices about the direction to take, agile
helps to explore the options and make
decisions rapidly.
Wilfredo Pareto an economist in the
early 20 century presented a theory
that 80% of the value we create comes
from 20% of the effort put in. Identifying
this 20% helps to ensure we focus on
what creates the most value quickly and
effectively.
Agile is a value-driven method, with
success measured on value created. It
focuses on the creation of working
solutions that create the best return on
investment. Give yourself time to reflect
and analyse your business models and
solutions and use the principle to help
you to identify the 20% that is of the
most value, optimise the amount of
‘work not done’ to reach your objectives.
Think big, act small
When we start an agile business we
have a wonderful vision of how we
imagine our business when it is mature,
many when asked who and where they
will sell their product or service will be in
the mindset that it will be bought by
everyone, and that it will be sold
everywhere, and that is a great vision to
have for the future. But this vision is
one of the future, it is not the reality of
where you are today, you need to
identify the who, what, where and how
that you can do today that will set you
on your journey to achieving your
ambitions.
Agile encourages us to think big but act
small, who will be the innovators and
early adopters who will engage with
your agile business today, who is keen
for a new solution to the problem that
your business and products/services will
solve for them? These will be your early
customers, the clients you can learn
from, who are keen to help and
feedback so that you can refine and
evolve your offering to fit the first
customers you work with and build
something you can repeatedly sell to
others.
Have a clear goal that identifies the
value you seek to deliver, and the
problems you aim to solve. Break things
down into manageable chunks of value,
and work in short sprints to deliver value
early.
Challenge your assumptions
We all make assumptions when we start
a business, both ourselves, our clients
and others. Sometimes these are
assumptions are correct, and
sometimes they are not. We don’t know
what we don’t know, and to start an
agile business we need to accept that
we don’t know what we don’t know. If
Henry Ford had asked his customers
what they wanted, they would have said
a faster horse!
Keep it simple, start with a minimum
viable product and then make regular,
small incremental improvements based
on feedback to reach the big goal. Get
out there and share your idea, work out
a way to test the value you aim to deliver
without spending your entire budget,
because guaranteed it will change.
There are lots of ways you can test out
your business idea, you can test out
your concepts through social media
before you even have a product to sell,
you can set up a pop up shop to get
feedback early from potential
customers, the key is to gather
information as early as possible so that
you can refine and model your business
into an attractive offering that generates
recurring revenue before you run out of
cash, time and resource.
Agile works by integrating change on a
regular basis, whether it is driven by
internal or external forces. It is a
learning-based method and builds
continuous improvement into the early
stages of your business and will serve
well as a method for growing, scaling
and ultimately developing new products
and services that enable your business
to be sustainable and successful.
Sanity Metrics over Vanity Metrics
The metrics and measures that you track
when you start your business should tell
you whether you are doing the right
thing, and if you are doing the thing
right. They should tell you what is going
well, what you can do better, what has
changed and highlight any blocks or
issues that need your attention.
A vanity metric will tell you what you
want to hear, it will tell you what is going
well but it can also paint a picture that
distorts the truth and reality. Vanity
metrics are important, they help us to
sell and gain confidence in our ideas, but
we should not allow them to lull us into
a potential false sense of security.
Sanity Metrics are the measures that tell
us what we need to know to be able to
leverage success and address
weaknesses to ensure we are both
delivering the right thing, and delivering
the thing right. Sanity metrics help us
to identify whether we are gaining
traction and momentum, and identify
causes of friction.
Sanity metrics tell us what is actually
happening and how we are progressing
against our goals and objectives.
These metrics are real time true
representations of the current state of
play and performance trends that inform
decision making and drive direction for
future work.
Metrics should provide ratios and rates
that tell us continuously where we are
and measure if our actions are having
positive or negative effects on building a
sustainable, repeatable and scalable
business model.
Keep a Balance
Agile builds in time to reflect, think, and
experiment into the process, providing a
structure to make regular, small,
iterative improvements.
It is vital to balance both running your
new business and growing the business
in order for it to be able to continue to
sustain growth and deliver value. As a
business grows and develops it can
struggle with capacity, less time is
available for innovative activities as the
day to day orders, management and
accounting needs to be done. Agile
ensures that a balance is maintained of
running the day to day activities of the
business while making time for
continuous improvement and
development throughout the business,
consistently improving its products,
people, systems and processes. Use
agile to identify your skills gaps and see
where you need to learn more or get
help.
In order to build an agile start up a
business must ensure that its core is
flexible and adaptable and that it listens
to feedback and isn’t afraid to change
and try something new in order to
succeed.
Being agile takes confidence, it requires
that we accept that we do not know the
answers to everything and that we must
embrace change and work to respond
and adapt to the business environment
to find agility and success.
Being Agile in Business by Belinda
Waldock published in July 2015 from
Pearson, the world’s leading education
publisher, priced £12.99.
Belinda Waldock is a leading business
coach who has worked to help hundreds
of small to medium sized businesses to
overcome the challenges of fast growth
by adopting agile practices to create a
culture of agility.
Being Agile in Business provides simple,
jargon-free advice that is designed to be
read in an agile way – in short bursts
that can then be put into action in the
real world. The book walks the reader
through agile, explaining how the
strategies and tools can enable
organisations and individuals to work
faster and smarter and navigate the
uncertainty that all businesses face
every day. As well as tactics, tools,
templates and other practical guides,
Being Agile in Business provides real life
case studies to illustrate just how agile
can enable leaders to find their own way
to thrive in any situation.
Book http://amzn.to/1Jfv8AK
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