Is Planning the Barrier to Effective Agility?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

SHARE
Request to reuse this
Add to my favorites
Topics: Agile, Organizational Project Management

The concept of organizational agility, or enterprise agility, is an important one for companies to succeed today. Most have recognized that, and in recent years have sought out the ability to adjust plans and implement those changes as efficiently and effectively as possible. This helps them minimize disruption and maximize the ability to achieve business goals.

But there is a problem that, in my experience, many organizations are failing to address. And it’s a problem of their own making.

Restricting your own agility
To explain, let me give you an example from an organization that I have been working with recently. Their business leaders are convinced that they have made real progress toward achieving organizational agility. As evidence, they point to the number of successful projects that they have been able to deliver over the last few years, stressing the number of changes that had to be implemented. There is no doubt that they have improved organizational performance of projects by any metric that you want to use.

However, I don’t think that they are optimizing performance. There are still some improvements to make. When I spoke to the project managers and teams, they still felt that there are limits to the agility that the organization has been able to achieve. As one project manager put it, “It’s hard to buy in to the concept of …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.