Business Agility

Business agility is essential for organizations looking to succeed in today's fast-paced and ever-changing business environment. It enables businesses to respond quickly to changing market conditions, customer needs, and emerging technologies.

With business agility, organizations can improve their decision-making, increase their innovation, and reduce time-to-market for new products and services. By adopting agile practices, businesses can become more customer-focused, collaborate better across teams, and continuously improve their processes.

Organizations facing intense, globalized competition can differentiate themselves through increased customer focus, quality and innovation. Once the need for change is well defined and established within the company, the focus should shift towards a continuous flow of value to stay relevant. Deloitte's Business Agility Offering is all about future-proofing an organization. We help organizations to thrive in the age of Digital.

Enter Agile

Agile is a way of working that emphasizes iterative planning and delivery. It aims to deliver value to customers early and often, and is specifically designed to deal with complexity in unpredictable environments. From its roots in product and software development, Agile is now spreading rapidly across industries.

Scaling Agile beyond individual projects and programs to work throughout the enterprise is challenging. Highly complex business and regulatory environments, legacy systems and bureaucratic, siloed organizational structures are as much of a hindrance to embedding Agile as they are to daily operations. Overcoming these necessitates looking across the entire organization - from technology to people, processes and governance.

Agile is not easy, and it does not happen overnight. That said, when executed correctly, it is proven to make the inevitability of change not only manageable but rewarding as well.
 

Our services for Business Agility

Executing an enterprise level transformation or scaling Agile to a program or portfolio level requires a holistic approach that considers all aspects of an operating model as well as the organization’s culture, capabilities and context. A one-size-fits-all approach is simply not sufficient.

At Deloitte, we specialize in empowering businesses to achieve business agility through our offered services. With our extensive experience in agile transformation, we offer support to clients at various stages of their journey.

This includes helping organizations adopt Lean Portfolio Management, providing guidance in Value Stream mapping, assuming Agile Roles to support continuous agile delivery, and coaching leaders and teams in adopting Agile Ways of Working. Our expertise covers every aspect of agile transformation, ensuring that organizations receive the guidance they need to thrive and excel in business agility.

Below follows a selection of our strongest capabilities at Deloitte Sweden

Lean portfolio management
Lean portfolio management is a framework to manage and optimize the portfolio of projects and initiatives across an organization to ensure alignment with strategic objectives, improve transparency, and increase the delivery of value to customers. It helps organizations prioritize and fund the right initiatives and projects based on their strategic goals, capacity, and risk tolerance.

Deloitte Nordics have created an LPM Playbook to support applying this method into organizations. The playbook describes how LPM and DVS (Development Value Streams) are used to optimize value delivery across the organization. LPM is a management approach that involves aligning investment funding and prioritization decisions with the organization's strategic goals and objectives. DVS, on the other hand, is a process-oriented approach that involves mapping, analyzing, and optimizing the end-to-end flow of value through the software delivery pipeline. By aligning LPM and DVS, organizations can ensure that their investments and priorities are aligned with their value delivery goals, and that their delivery processes are optimized for speed, quality, and reliability.

Objectives & Key Results
An organization can work with Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) by setting specific, measurable, and time-bound objectives aligned with the company's vision and mission, and defining key results that measure progress toward those objectives. The organization can use OKRs to foster a culture of transparency, accountability, and continuous improvement, and to enable better alignment and focus on what matters most. OKRs are commonly used in the Lean Portfolio Management framework.
 

Value Stream Mapping (VSM)
The goal of VSM is to enable maximum flow of business value through the end-to-end solution delivery life cycle. Value stream mapping involves identifying each step in the process, analyzing the value-added and non-value-added activities, and mapping out the flow of materials, information, and resources. This helps to identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies in the process, allowing organizations to optimize their processes, reduce waste, and improve overall efficiency and quality.

Agile CoP in Sweden have created a Value Stream Playbook to be utilized in the mapping process. It's designed to teach, walkthrough, and quality assure.

Workforce transition
Learning how to work, think and be agile is crucial to maximize the output of an agile transition. In today's workplace, agile have often been introduced in some way – but is it used to its highest potential?
Workforce transition towards agile involves adopting a new mindset and way of working that values collaboration, flexibility, and continuous improvement. This may require training and upskilling employees to develop the necessary technical and interpersonal skills to work effectively in an agile environment. Organizations must also create a culture that supports experimentation and innovation, provides regular feedback, and empowers employees to take ownership of their work. By transitioning towards agile, organizations can improve their responsiveness to changing market conditions, increase productivity, and deliver value more efficiently.
 

Agile coaching
Agile coaching within an organization involves working with individuals and teams to help them adopt an agile mindset and way of working. This includes providing guidance on agile principles and practices, identifying and addressing impediments, and facilitating collaboration and continuous improvement to support the organization's overall agile transformation.

Agile Delivery
Agile delivery is an iterative and incremental approach to project delivery that focuses on delivering value to the customer through continuous feedback and collaboration. It involves breaking down complex projects into smaller, manageable pieces and delivering them in short timeframes, allowing for greater flexibility and adaptability in response to changing requirements and priorities.

Methodology Training (SAFe)
Training in the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) methodology involves providing individuals and teams with the knowledge and skills to implement the framework effectively. This includes understanding the principles, practices, and roles of SAFe, as well as learning how to collaborate and coordinate with other teams in a large-scale agile environment.

Deloitte offer consultants with different Agile SAFe certificates, meaning we are educated in the framework we support our clients with and can also help facilitate trainings.

Set up and architecture of tooling
Setting up architecture and tooling is an essential part of enabling an agile way of working. Agile organizations must have the right infrastructure and tools in place to support their processes, workflows, and communication channels. This includes adopting cloud-based technologies, implementing DevOps practices, and leveraging agile project management tools such as Jira or Trello. By establishing a robust architecture and tooling, organizations can optimize their workflows, increase collaboration and visibility, and improve their overall agility and responsiveness to changing customer

Continuous learning organization
An organization can continuously learn by creating a culture that values experimentation, failure, and continuous improvement. This can be achieved by providing opportunities for training, encouraging feedback and knowledge sharing, and promoting a growth mindset among employees.

Leadership skills and mindset
Changing the culture and mindset in an organization to be more agile requires a top-down approach, with leaders setting the example and championing the agile values and principles. Education and training programs can help employees understand the benefits of agile, and regular feedback and continuous improvement processes can encourage experimentation and risk-taking. Finally, creating a culture of transparency and collaboration, where everyone is encouraged to contribute and share their ideas, can help foster agility and innovation.
 

Agile testing
Agile testing is a testing approach that supports the principles and practices of agile software development. It involves continuously testing the software as it is being developed, rather than waiting until the end of the development cycle to test. Agile testing focuses on collaboration, communication, and feedback, and involves all members of the development team, including developers, testers, and business stakeholders. The goal is to identify and fix issues early on, ensuring that the software meets the needs of the customer and delivers value.

DevOps
DevOps plays an important role in driving business agility. By embracing collaboration, automation, continuous feedback, and operational resilience, organizations can achieve accelerated time-to-market, enhance collaboration, foster a culture of continuous learning, and maintain flexibility and scalability. Adopting DevOps practices empowers organizations to respond rapidly to market changes, deliver innovative solutions, and thrive in an ever-evolving business landscape.
 

Case study

One global financial services company turned to Deloitte when it sought a new way to develop software that would help enable new digital banking options for its customers. Driven to be more innovative, our client looked to scale and accelerate Agile adoption by creating product-based teams empowered to innovate and deploy their products independently across the platform.
 

Nordic Deloitte Business Agility Survey 2021

A pulse survey on Business Agility across organizations in the Nordics.

Deloitte has collected insights on how Business Agility is used across Nordic organizations. The survey is focused on organizations already applying Agile ways of working at both small and large scale. The survey summarizes the key findings of the current maturity on Business Agility and through common patterns and anti-patterns observed, it provides recommendations to organizations toward becoming a true Agile enterprise.

Reach the survey here: Nordic Deloitte Business Agility Survey 2021 | Deloitte
 

Delivering a Business Agility journey

Delivery of a future proof organization follows an agile approach with three distinct phases and can be applied to all current enterprise Agile frameworks to guide clients through their journey. We optimize the people, processes, tools and architecture needed to take clients from Imagine, to Deliver, and ultimately to Run. The knowledge and insights we share with clients are based on successful Agile transformations with clients across the globe.

Maturity of Business Agility growth

An organization’s next steps depend on the current stage in the Business Agility Spectrum and where the organization wants to be in the future.