In the first half of this series, we talked about five benefits you can get from your business agility journey. Now, as we introduced last week, we are switching topics to talk about the first of five aspects that support you in your journey or will be barriers if not overcome. In this article, we’ll be exploring feedback loops, an essential element to business agility.

Big changes come from a series of small changes. Large transformative programs are too disruptive and take too long to produce results. To see the results of your series of small changes, you need feedback loops. Without them, you won’t be able to see if you are going in the right direction and course-correct as you go.

Feedback loops inform you of what is happening in your system of work. They tell your developers the impact of their changes, inform your product team what your customers are looking for, and tell operations where to focus. 

So what makes a “good” feedback loop? 

Over the last few weeks, we’ve talked about five specific benefits that Business Agility can bring to your organization. Among them are:

• Reducing costs

• Increasing revenue

• Improving your alignment

• Improving culture and retention

• Creating resilient systems

While Business Agility brings many benefits, implementing it effectively is a challenge. When adopting Business Agility, businesses are bound to encounter both internal and external challenges.

These challenges must be addressed if you wish to get the most benefits from implementing business agility into your organization. Below we discuss five of these challenges. We have also discussed these on our Definitely, Maybe Agile podcast. Let us take a look at these obstacles, and how to work through them. 

The next topic in our series on Business Agility for your bottom line is how the adoption of business agility practices can help increase your revenue. When it comes to building a profitable organization, a key goal is to increase revenue. Business agility helps an organization’s revenue growth in many ways, here are three:

• Put out high-quality products into the market

• Accelerate feedback loops to learn from customers

• Identify opportunities to capitalize on

Introducing business agility to an organization can have a lot of benefits to a company's bottom line. It can increase revenue, profitability, and employee retention rates. Among these improvements, one change that can often heavily and rapidly affect a company’s bottom line is reducing the cost of delivery. 

Business Agility enables a company to reduce cost of delivery through:

• improving its delivery processes

• becoming more deliberate with its projects

• having a willingness to stop

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus was onto something when he said many years ago that

A saying as true today as it was for Heraclitus in Ancient Greece.

Today, businesses are impacted by change. Competitors introduce new capabilities or services, customers' loyalty shifts from brands towards value propositions, and new and exciting players disrupt the market altogether.

As the world goes into lockdown due to COVID-19 and organizations are asking their employees to work from home, new problems arise. Not least of which being whether the organizations we work for can handle the implications of everybody suddenly working from home.

The majority of my work is predominantly done remotely with the exception being when I am directly involved in team coaching or running workshops. I’ve also worked with and coached international teams and can understand the difficulties it raises. This is not a new problem, but it is one that is certainly front of mind as we scramble to deal with this crisis. Not everybody will thrive in a home environment, and at the very least, there is a period of adjustment. First, we need the necessities of internet connection, workspace setup and ensuring they can access the organizational system they need. Beyond that, for those people who usually do not to work-from-home, how do you handle coaching your suddenly distributed teams?

So, wi...