The Journey to Business Agility: What Grade is Your Organization In?

It’s that time of year when young adults start packing up and heading to college to begin their 100, 200, 300, or finally 400-level courses, each building on the other. They thought their 100-level courses were hard, well they were, but just wait until you get to the 400 level. The course levels in college provide a useful metaphor for what businesses grapple with when it comes to measuring the outcomes produced by business agility.

Freshman Year: The 100 Level—Understanding What to Measure

At the 100 level, your first year, you are trying to understand what you might measure. An all-too-common refrain is typical, “We’ve never been able or tried to measure the effect,” or from the naysayer, “Improved agility has never produced a measurable outcome.”

Sophomore Year: The 200 Level—Laying the Foundation

Then at the 200 level, your second year comes along, and you lay out basics that you will begin to track based on organizational feedback across your teams, e.g. frequency of releases, backlog health, velocity, quality, etc. You start feeling much smarter.

Junior Year: The 300 Level—Refining Your Approach

Your third year comes along, and as metrics roll in and prove your points about efficiency, you tweak some of them further based on your in-depth knowledge. You might even understand some seasonality in your efforts and recurring ‘static’ that comes along. You start feeling great about the prospects of your upcoming graduation.

Senior Year: The 400 Level—Facing the Ultimate Challenge

Then, as you start your senior year, your CEO/Business head says, “What we are building is not fundamentally improving our business fast enough. What are you going to do about it?” You ask yourself the most important question, “How do I ensure I am building the right things?” It’s not that you don’t need your 300-level coursework; it is more necessary than ever. You need the knowledge of both—the academic knowledge and application of those metrics in achieving real-world business outcomes.

At CC Pace, we are thrilled to be working at the highest levels of a US Manufacturer firmly in its “junior year” with the following benefits:

• Time-to-market improved by 10%
• Workforce efficiency increased by 20%
• Transparency and integration across business areas improved based on leadership feedback due to our work creating portfolio transparency, integrating cross-functional planning, and implementing advanced tooling configurations.

As we look towards 2025, the next step is to make sure the right set of projects are being worked on, not just that they are individually more efficient. We are eager to help them graduate!

What level is your organization at? We can help you skip a grade and get to graduation sooner!