Product > Project: Accelerating Agile

The disruption, acceleration, and outright chaos of the past year and a half has transformed business permanently. Now, as we progressively reach for stability, the lessons from this tumultuous period are becoming clearer — from the ever-expanding benefits of digitization to the need to re-evaluate our global supply chains.

One of our newest insights at Infosys, however, has been lessons learned about the value of a well-established practice, rather than an emerging technology. In a survey of 1,000 business and technology leaders, we found that the expansion and refining of Agile techniques and behaviors improved the bottom line in one of the most challenging times in memory.

The Agile Radar 2021 report determined that companies reporting the best financial performances used cross-functional, autonomous teams. They rapidly built capabilities, gathered feedback, and quickly iterated to meet the needs of their most important stakeholders. This Agile approach ignited innovation, brought together business and technology, and focused teams on building the right product over meeting project deadlines.

This just released research found that firms with a high Agile capability outperformed those using more traditional project-based approaches. In fact, by utilizing seven distinct Agile levers — six of which have a strong people component — we found that firms were 63% more likely to grow faster than their peers.

These levers include the following:

• Generate customer insights for better customer journeys.

• Organize teams around these journeys.

• Bring business units into the Agile mindset through cross-functional collaboration.

• Create self-organized teams.

• Upskill and reskill team members using digital learning platforms.

• Use Agile workspaces with open layouts.

• Go virtual with digital tools and collaboration platforms.

Kraft Heinz, for example, used Snowflake’s analytics platform to remap customer journeys in pursuit of creating a customer-driven culture. This gave the firm the ability to quickly sense, respond, and evolve, and to develop more meaningful interactions with core customers. Self-organized teams of business analysts and data scientists were able to build effective data models to calculate optimal inventory levels.

To develop this Agile culture, Heinz put in place several enterprise-wide learning programs to nurture a consumer-first mindset. With a hybrid workforce, individuals across the firm are linked in a data network where they can seamlessly share any needed information, securely and with respect for privacy.  

Plenty of studies have illustrated the value of technology, from artificial intelligence to the cloud. However, firms need to refine their approach as they pursue digital transformation. Organizing teams around products — rather than projects — also significantly improves a company’s Business Success score, a metric we developed during our research. Firms that fully utilized their product management and experience design capabilities increased their market share, lowered costs, and made employees happier. Executives seem to understand the advantages of this approach. They said that onboarding highly skilled, customer-centric product owners was one of the top investments, according to Agile Radar 2021 survey results.

In our research, we found one very high-achieving cohort of firms that’s worth a closer look. Labeled “Sprinters,” they are product-centric and customer-focused, with a strategy that utilizes the seven growth levers already mentioned. This strategy reflects a more holistic approach to enterprise agility, rather than adopting Agile sequentially and in pockets. For more on agility, see our recent Harvard Business Review article on micro-change management, and our recent book The Live Enterprise: Create a Continuously Evolving and Learning Organization (McGraw-Hill, 2021).

Sprinters achieve stronger business results, compared to other archetypes in the research, while also delivering substantial IT benefits. At one leading automotive firm in Europe, this Sprinter engagement model accelerated the move toward an entirely new business model, while delivering best-in-class customer solutions. A fully committed set of work and leadership principles paved the way for servant leadership and formed the basis of high-performance teams — imbued with the right skillset and an entrepreneurial spirit.  

We’ve found that doing Agile the right way leads to new levels of performance and customer fulfillment. A sound Agile strategy for the coming years requires executives and managers to look more closely at the cultural makeup of teams, focus on value created over project delivery, and provide leadership that moves the right Agile levers — at the right time — to sprint ahead of the competition. 

More findings from our Agile research are available here. Take our interactive online Agile assessment to see how you score against the Sprinters.   

The takeaway: Agile is a wonderful software development approach -- and an even better operating model, to stay current on market needs and deliver value to a continuously evolving market.