We’re All About Business Agility

The product manager should be one of the more straightforward roles in helping an organization drive business agility. Since they are directly accountable for the success of their products, the tools and solutions they require are directly linked to the strategic success of the entire organization.

Program managers differ from project managers in that they’re responsible for multiple different initiatives with multiple teams, under a variety of delivery approaches. To drive business agility, they need the right tools to ensure the best possible performance across all of the related projects and initiatives they manage.

The management function closest to the frontline of work execution, the domain PMO must be given the tools and focus needed to succeed. To be effective and contribute to business agility, PMOs require total visibility across all work regardless of how it is being delivered (traditional, agile or ad-hoc).

Resource management must happen at a strategic level, span all resources in all business areas, and address needs across multiple business cycles. To drive business agility, resource managers should adopt a comprehensive approach that supports all work, across the entire enterprise, regardless of execution method.

Project managers drive business agility through effective delivery and execution. But being on-time, on-scope and on-budget is irrelevant unless a project also delivers ‘on-benefit’. So it’s critical for project managers to embrace capabilities that ensure all execution is aligned with strategy.

Using Lean and Agile practices, this role helps to drive business agility by delivering the innovative, high-quality products and services the organization needs to compete in an ever-changing world. This requires solutions and approaches that transcend and complement the typical Agile toolset, connecting work with value.

Many of the decisions that happen every day to help drive business agility, happen at the individual team member level. That’s why having the right tools and solutions that ensure alignment across the enterprise is so crucial to ensure that everyone’s work is driving the right transformation.

Today’s Enterprise Architects (EAs) must do more than simply define and enforce technology standards. EAs who understand their role within an agile business focus on driving innovation and business outcomes. EAs who don’t adapt to this reality risk being marginalized to foundational tasks, which won’t drive business value.

Having access to trusted data is fundamental to driving business agility. Using company-wide data best practices – and in coordination with the business architect – a data manager can leverage a variety of capabilities to help ensure that the organization can quickly respond to any opportunity or disruption by leveraging a complete, accurate and contextualized enterprise data set.

IT portfolio managers need visibility into all work, regardless of how it is being executed. To contribute to business agility, IT portfolio managers must be able to see an integrated picture of everything that is happening – across all of the tri-modal reality – while also moving beyond just managing traditional projects. Only then can they support the ability to optimize business value.

This role is crucial in helping an organization identify, articulate and establish the rationale for change – a fundamental concept of business agility. But the business analyst must also have the right tools and processes in place to help them align with other key stakeholders to ensure that they are defining an effective transformation approach.

Nobody better understands how all the key elements within an organization work together to define the enterprise. The business architect needs the right tools to see and understand these relationships, in order to help the organization more effectively connect its strategies with the operation of the business, and with the planned evolution and transformation of that business.

More than just the individuals responsible for key enterprise functions, departments or business areas, executives drive business agility by ensuring that the enterprise, and every function within it, is contributing to the overall organizational strategy. This requires tools and solutions to provide enterprise-wide visibility, drive effective decision making and help maintain accountability to the organization’s strategic plan.

Whether work is being delivered using agile, waterfall or ad-hoc methods, the financial role requires visibility. From products to projects to programs to capabilities, in order to help drive business agility, finance must be able to see everything that’s happening as it happens, and how much money is being spent, and is forecast to be spent.

Also known as SRO (Strategy Realization Office) or EPMO (Enterprise Project Management Office), this role is crucial for driving business agility and strategic outcomes by ensuring that all work is aligned with business strategy. It is the function that delivers Strategic Portfolio Management, while connecting top-down strategy execution with the working teams delivering throughout the organization.

The portfolio manager is key to business agility and enabling business outcomes, acting as the glue between the Strategy Realization Office, line-of-business executives and the domain PMOs delivering the work. Their success depends on the portfolio manager’s ability to deliver against the organization’s strategic plans.