In an ever-changing world where innovation and adaptability are crucial, Agile remains fundamental to business organisation, team building and delivering value to customers. The year 2024 marks a new chapter in this trajectory, highlighting the importance of collaboration, efficiency, growth and value chain improvement to strengthen customer relationships.

At Keepler, we consider Agile a key element in improving value delivery. This requires an integral participation of the entire organisation, a decisive support at the corporate level, a holistic approach that transcends mere delivery and the use of objective metrics to guide decision making, minimising subjective biases.

Enterprise agility as a backbone

Enterprise agility, understood as a method that permeates all activities and areas of the company, represents an amalgam of flexibility, adaptability and proactive response to market changes. This framework must be sponsored by top management and implemented by all areas of responsibility. Therefore, a hybrid approach between a bottom-up or top-down perspective is the most effective, since it leverages the strategic vision along with the innovation that flourishes from the execution areas. The need to support this approach will continue in 2024 to accompany leadership initiatives that support this approach.

The key to success lies in the ability to adapt to unexpected changes, to unwanted or unforeseen situations. This enables anti-fragile structures that do not avoid disaster or prevent it, but generate patterns that make them resilient against adversity.

Enterprise agility impacts all areas of a company and vertebrates from Marketing to Finance or People. An Agile model implemented in personnel selection makes the process more efficient, accelerates it and improves the quality of the candidates. In 2024 we will see more and more areas or departments benefiting from this model in their development and decision making.

The organisational culture is the tone that is perceived in a company and that is unique to each of them, it should not only promote agility, but also reflect it. A flexible structure, such as the one proposed by Keepler, cannot be replicated, since experience is not transferable, but it is possible to learn from his iterative collaboration and role-based competency model.

Value-stream management

The development of a value-stream flow is crucial for improving team collaboration and understanding both individual and overall objectives. Effective value-stream management shortens overall flow time, reduces time-to-market, improves product quality, involves everyone in the value chain, reduces inefficiencies and costs, and promotes continuous improvement. A well-managed value-stream allows you to identify where value is being created and blocked and where to make improvements. It involves assessing the current status, identifying challenges, defining the desired state, eliminating waste and developing an action plan for the future.

This plan should be flexible and updated with new information. Agilists must become architects, designing custom frameworks to suit the needs of the team and the organisation. It is about building patterns applicable to different teams, selecting useful practices and elements. The unFix approach, created in 2022 by Jürgen Appelo, which has become an immediate trend as it collects patterns from historically proven successful tools and practices, will be very useful in 2024 for approaches like this because it also offers team typologies to adapt to the needs and maximise the value delivered.

Continuous updating of knowledge is crucial. Trainings such as unFix or product management should be combined to respond to changing needs, by selecting appropriate components for a framework and managing the value-stream. Continuous training should be driven by individual curiosity and supported by innovation workshops in secure environments, with a continuous feedback system for sharing experiences and learning.

Integrating training with strategic plans allows employees to adapt to changing markets. Setting up trainings within the company’s value-stream chain, such as unFix and product management, creates a learning path in parallel with key milestones of value management. During 2024, the decisive push for non-dogmatic frameworks that allow the integration of those parts that are most relevant depending on the business context will remain.

Data-Driven Decision Making with AI support

Data-driven decision making is a key trend in the business environment that consists of integrating data analysis into the decision-making process. This methodology is adapted according to the area and type of decision, reducing subjectivity and fostering informed decisions.

At Keepler we emphasise the use of data to improve decision making in the value chain and in customer delivery, supported by a corporate structure that promotes an Agile approach. The use of objective and verifiable data replaces intuition and past experience. A crucial factor is the data quality, which must be managed by the teams that generate it and used to continuously improve the decision-making process in their respective domains. The adoption of business intelligence tools that foster collaboration between areas is vital to democratise and improve the informed decision-making process.

Logically, the omnipresence of AI is an unavoidable factor that will completely change the way decision-making is interpreted:

• It processes and analyses vast amounts of data, identifies patterns and trends that might otherwise go unnoticed.
• It predicts tendencies and potential outcomes so that decisions can be made based on them and not just on accumulated history.
• It uses algorithms and models, being free of any human bias that could compromise objectivity in the decision-making process.
• It makes real-time recommendations, with data that is generated live, to respond under different scenarios to changing conditions as they arise, as it can use data to personalise and segment market plots and accurately interpret customer needs more effectively and thus improve the effectiveness of an organisation’s strategies.

In 2024, Agile can become much more relevant and flexible and bring more value at all levels (business or product development) from the beginning to the end of the value chain by incorporating the concept of framework architecture and placing data at the heart of decision making.

Therefore, as we have seen, we consider four pillars, which are in fact different sections of a step pyramid, to be extremely relevant for 2024:

• Orientation towards value-stream improvement stretching from the beginning and all the way to the end of that value chain.
• Placing data at the centre of decision making to impact where it is relevant.
• Turn agilists into framework architects, adapted to the needs of each team, area or company.
• Impregnate all areas of the company with the Agile spirit as a common thread.

With these four pillars we could concentrate the efforts that companies must make to seek customer satisfaction in an increasingly competitive and voracious environment.

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Image: Unsplash | Natalie Pedigo