Why agile South African companies are thriving in 2022

Why Agile South African Companies Are Thriving In 2022

Agility is essential for businesses looking to not only survive but thrive in 2022 and beyond. However, many businesses remain unequipped to meet this need, even though they recognise its importance. Below, we unpack why agility is key to growing your business.

What is an agile company?

An agile company has a workforce that does not rely heavily on inflexible hierarchies and structures, and instead focuses on mobility. This allows the business to restructure its processes dynamically to deal with changing market requirements without the need for long, drawn-out planning phases. The pandemic was an excellent example of why this is important. When it hit, businesses needed to adapt rapidly to survive.

Businesses that had already embraced the benefits of being agile were much better equipped to deal with this sudden change, and in many cases were even able to grow their business during this period. In contrast, businesses that had not embraced agility found themselves struggling, as their rigid structures were not optimised to deal with the situation.

Workforce behaviour and skills

Businesses that want to become more agile must embrace the concept across the entire organisation – from leadership to the most junior of employees. This means moving away from methodologies and processes towards understanding that agile behaviour is a way of working that must be supported and displayed by all. Leadership must lead the agile approach and then employees should be encouraged to follow.

It also means recognising that nothing is built perfectly the first time. You embrace change through incremental deployment to ensure you can quickly adapt to and learn from mistakes.

This is one of the critical concepts of building superior business agility – employing shorter planning horizons with an incremental deployment strategy that gets the ball rolling faster.

This generates faster market feedback, thereby ensuring more rapid value creation.

Scaling agility through business transformation

Once you have the buy-in of both leadership and your employees, the next step is to scale an agile approach throughout your business. A great way of doing this is by employing cross-functional teams with a wide variety of skills. Your teams will not be bound by a rigid organisational structure and can instead adapt to changing environments to optimise their output.

As your organisational structure becomes more fluid, your customers will benefit, as they receive a cutting-edge product or service that is continually improved upon.

Why agile companies thrive

Ultimately, agile companies stay ahead of the curve by confidently dealing with and adapting to new trends.

Torque IT provides IT courses, and  project management training that helps your company embrace agility at every level, from employee behaviour to all aspects of your business.