What Is An Agile Organization?
An agile organization is a company that prioritizes adaptability, speed and flexibility in its processes and decision-making to quickly respond to changes and opportunities in its environment.
Agile structures and the challenges that come with them
The fast paced and unpredictable nature of today’s work environment poses new challenges for many businesses. Organizations today have to constantly adapt their structure in response to disruptive business conditions, which has created an increased interest in adopting and scaling an agile methodology.
According to the Harvard Business Review, 8 out of 10 businesses have now committed to adopting an agile approach to organizing their workforce into cross-functional teams. However, this approach gives rise to many planning difficulties relating to the temporary nature of resource allocation and the constant need for recalibration.
What are agile structures?
An agile structure is the process of organizing the workforce into cross functional teams delivering on a common project, over a short period of time. In many cases, agility has proven to help organizations embrace the unpredictable work environment by being customer-centric, implementing fast learning and decision cycles, and building a network of empowered teams motivated by a common purpose.
What are the Characteristics of an Agile Organization?
- Flexibility and Adaptability: They can quickly respond to market changes, customer demands, and new technologies.
- Decentralized Decision-Making: Empowerment is given to cross-functional teams, allowing for faster and more effective decision-making.
- Customer-Centricity: A strong focus on customer needs and experiences.
- Continuous Improvement: A commitment to ongoing refinement and development of processes, products and services.
- Collaboration and Transparency: High levels of teamwork and open communication.
- Innovative Culture: Encouragement of experimentation and acceptance of failure as a part of the learning process.
- Lean Processes: Streamlined operations that focus on value creation and waste reduction.
What are the Benefits of an Agile Organizational Structure?
- Quick responsiveness and adaptability, with decentralized decision-making for faster market response
- Innovation through empowered teams and continuous improvement.
- Emphasizing collaboration and transparency enhances communication and aligns goals, boosting employee engagement and satisfaction.
- Agile structures thus make companies competitive in dynamic industries.
Visualizing agile teams in Orgvue
Our solutions
Benefits of Orgvue for agile organizations
Orgvue gives you the flexibility to build, visualize, run and measure agile organizations on a continuous basis. It enables businesses to manage their workforce based on available skills and team capacity, manage reporting lines at scale and sustain an adaptable and resilient structure.
Orgvue is an organizational design and planning platform, designed to help large and complex organizations confidently adapt to fast-paced environments. It provides businesses with the technology to build and maintain agile teams, by allowing them to design the right operating model and align resources and capacity across the business.
Analyze
Take a data-driven approach to support the building of agile workforce planning
- Bring in data from multiple systems, clean it and baseline it in a single source of truth
- Reduce manual effort to execute designs and tracking with speed and consistency
- Accelerate your efforts to meet deadlines.
Design
Flexibly model and visualize agile teams
- Use Orgvue’s powerful visuals to model multiple hierarchies on the same dataset
- Orgvue’s drag-and-drop functionality allows you to construct, model and visualize agile teams
- Ensure appropriate allocation of resources (capability vs work)
Plan
Create your own talent marketplace
- Gain visibility into your talent supply and skills
- Deploy talent across teams and manage capacity
- Empower planners by giving them control over the agile and functional setup
Monitor
Refresh and analyze data regularly
- Review performance summaries of your agile teams
- Understand the efficiency of your structure
- Create and deploy new teams whenever needed
Take advantage of Orgvue’s expertise and best practice
How Orgvue can help you strategize, plan and run your agile structure.
Micro-design: establish your groundwork and define your team structure
Set the foundation of your design, construct and visualize your agile architecture, teams and roles, and target full-time equivalent based on the customer journey.
Showing an agile setup structure using Orgvue, foundation of the work that’s going to come next
Showing individuals mapped into the structure with their respective FTE using Orgvue, including alerts of over- or under-allocation
Talent marketplace: Analyze, allocate and manage talent
Orgvue’s visuals give you visibility on talent, both in the functional hierarchy and the agile set up. Search for individuals based on criteria such as skills, experience, location or availability, and map them across teams while managing capacity. This way, you can make sure no one is stretched across roles and teams are not over or under-allocated. Ensure you haven’t missed anything by letting Orgvue validate your selection or highlight potential errors in the process.
Review summaries for agile teams
Go back and make sure you assess your structure and progress. In alignment with your planning cycles, see your headcount, full-time-equivalent cost data, and the efficiency of the structure you put in place.
Showing the reviewing of aggregate and individual summaries using Orgvue
Customer story
Managing transition to future operating model and integrating various design initiatives
$120m
Cost savings
Cost savings planned and tracked in real time
5,000
People
People integrated as a result of acquisition
26
Agile teams defined
26 agile teams defined with cost savings and profit impact
Orgvue is now our ‘source of truth’ to plan and understand talent decisions at varying levels of granularity. This has created confidence in our ability to achieve our goals and has created a new set of capabilities in HR and Finance.
Chief Financial Officer, major global bank
Business goal
- Redesign of the organization to an operating model focused on cross-functional teams around customer journeys
- Take out $120M cost within 2 years
- Integrate a 5,000 – person acquired company
Solution
- Identified $75m in savings across the organization within a few weeks
- Launched scalable data model to support ongoing redesign and tracking against plans
- Deployed solution to design 20+ agile teams, find talent/capabilities and manage capacity at scale
- Integrated talent from the acquired company and created a robust succession planning capability
- Launched in-house capabilities within HR and Finance to sustain the program
Solution brief
Agile organizations
Learn how Orgvue can help you with successfully building, running and sustaining agile structures.
Download the Orgvue agile organizations solution brief to find out how Orgvue can help you to successfully build, run and sustain agile structures and learn more about:
- Common challenges to overcome when creating agile structures
- 3 steps that will enable you to successfully design, build and run agile structures
- A SaaS platform that changes everything
- A customer case study
Book your free demo
Design your business of tomorrow, today. Discover what Orgvue can do for your organization first-hand.