Alexandra Levits Water Cooler Wisdom Agile Businesses Are Successful Businesses

Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom Agile Businesses Are Successful Businesses Everyone has heard the fable about the tortoise and the hare. Conventional wisdom says that slow and steady wins the race. A strategy may not be perfect, but if one executes it patiently and consistently, it may outperform better initiatives that don’t get the benefit of time. However, in today’s rapidly changing business world, an agile business is a successful business. So how do you reconcile these two truths? How do you know when the best thing for the project is to change the plan, and how can you execute and communicate changes without destroying team motivation and momentum? Business Agility Insight #1: Create and Challenge Assumptions Any major strategic initiative should involve the upfront establishment of goals, milestones, and success metrics. But, as Tim Berry pointed out in his article for the Small Business Administration website, assumptions should also be considered in your initial planning. “Tracking your results, you want to be able to compare them to what you had planned or expected to see,” he said. “Get your team members together once a month to review your plan and its results. “Take a hard look at your underlying assumptions and assess whether or not they’ve changed. If they have, there’s no virtue whatsoever in sticking to the plan you built on top of them.” Berry suggested you look at the difference between what you planned and what actually happened. Some results will be better than planned, and some will be worse. “For each key difference you discover, and all of them combined, use your best judgment to determine whether the differences were caused by false expectations or unexpected good or bad execution.” “Also, consider external and internal factors that may have influenced the results. Maybe your expectations were too conservative, or too optimistic. In that case, you revise your plan,” he said. Common sense, remarked Berry, is critical. Although the project may be close to your heart, you want to remain pragmatic: for example, asking yourself if you were you wrong about the whole thing, or just about the timing? You also want to consider if something else has occurred in the market to change your assumptions. In any case, said Berry, maybe you discover that you and your team have executed better than expected, or results were better than expected. “Hooray. Stick to the plan. It’s working,” he advised. “And maybe you discover that your execution was wrong, poor, or flawed. If that’s the case, change the plan.” For more business agility insights, check out the QuickBase Fast Track blog.