With accelerated globalization and the hyper-connectivity of the economy, businesses, especially SMEs, now have to contend with global competition and increasing technological complexity. Being creative, innovative while being able to simplify their processes allows the most agile companies to manage their strategies more effectively and to export better, further and faster.
According to Séverin Legras in “Agility, a new transformation for the company” agility is a concept, a state of mind and above all not a method. It is based on strong principles: better collaboration, acceptance of change and seeking rapid feedback through the delivery of functional partial products.
Team cohesion is a prerequisite for agility
It also requires values shared by the teams but all the parties concerned. In this collective adventure, the desire to improve and improve the organization will allow agility. If the company, through continuous improvement, becomes more flexible, it is then better equipped to combat crises.
Not only does this type of agile organization better perceive its environment and react to it quickly, but it also integrates it naturally into its system and its way of carrying out its projects.
Innovation through agility
The Agile company will involve its customers in the value creation process and deliver innovation by iteration of very short cycles (Lean Start-up, Sprint, Scrum), functional concepts and products that perfectly meet customer expectations in one time record. The company becomes a continuous learner.
Driving an Agile strategy means that processes are decompartmentalized and that investments and teams no longer operate in “per department” mode but in “cross-functional” mode.
This requires more versatile and more autonomous multidisciplinary teams. The management style is no longer pyramid with “Top-down” leadership but rather collaborative in Programs > Project Portfolio > Project Management mode.
Customer-centric vision
Customers are integrated into the Innovation process and participate in the co-design of prototypes: Proof Of Concept (POC), Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
These new concepts and products, developed using the Value Proposition Design matrix (Strategyzer, Wiley), provide more value and thus better meet market expectations.
Organizations, inspired by the Toyota model and at Lean maturity, use a strategic planning tool called “Hoshin Kanri”. It connects the vision and missions of the company to projects and gives meaning to employees by establishing a link between daily tasks and visual overall objectives.
This type of strategy in Agile mode requires a more flexible management model favoring teams with more autonomy and accountability for results, which involves support and training for managers and cross-functional operational teams.
In Agile mode, what matters is the continuous improvement of the value chain. On the other hand, the teams are more motivated and more loyal.
Agility during the covid crisis in hospitals
In a 2020 article, Philippe Anton demonstrates the effectiveness of implementing Agile and Lean practices in hospitals, where strong bureaucratic constraints prevail. Results are being achieved “on a dime” during the Covid crisis, even as managers and teams were swimming in fear and uncertainty.
As we have already demonstrated above, management is the keystone of change and must maintain a posture of agility in the face of the urgency of a major crisis.
“Agility seems to be attractive for public hospitals so that they can adjust to a turbulent, complex and unpredictable environment through a set of variations of agility: organizational agility, strategic agility, project management agility, human resources agility.”
Deharo, 2018.
As everywhere, the CHUs also had to adapt technically to the constraints and urgently adopt new tools and methods, helping technologies.
Simplify
For Auger (2008), it is necessary to simplify the system, to lighten the constraints, the multiplication of rules and to change the culture of “all control” to replace it with a framework allowing field managers to test, improvise and decide. A more empowering framework, with the full support of management, knowing how to assume their role proactively.
“We had a whole classic project program that was shattered, we reorganized all of this to use only the projects that came to support crisis management with the tools to maintain the link with patients. Tools planned by the management not ready, we short-circuited them by taking other tools for teleconsultation. I realized that many things are useless, now I wonder if I will keep the “Steering committee”, the “project committee”, finally we were effective with zero contamination.”
Testimony of a CHU staff member
For Anton, in all the university hospitals surveyed, the existing tools were insufficiently formalized or even unsuitable in the face of the sudden onset of the epidemic. An emergency management and animation system had been deployed. This crisis unit was responsible for regulating ministerial instructions by coordinating the production of protocols and procedures and by leading training.
Field decisions prime
What should be learned from these testimonials is that instead of being a centralized unit imposing a structuring framework from above, proactive listening to feedback from the field has enabled teams to be empowered, thanks to a exceptional degree of fraternity due to the situation.
The relational degree of this crisis experience has made it possible to modify the management of the overall vision and to improve the accountability of the operational teams, in the face of changing but precise directives (depending on the evolution of the epidemic).
“For teleworking, we have managed to organize remote work in a fluid way by activating 250 licenses in one month. In addition, there is support for the creation of Covid units and the creation of units in one afternoon where it would have taken two months normally. I did not understand before what it meant to be agile, in the end I realized that many things are useless. On the masks, we improvised before the national directive for distribution to the teams. We made live decisions.”
Testimony of a CHU staff member
Lean management, through its perpetual search for simplification, efficiency and progress, makes it possible to alleviate the constraints that weigh on the teams and weigh down the system, slowing it down.
While it remains complicated to transform a collective culture and human relationships inherited from the past, a dynamic of continuous improvement in agile mode contributes to the behavioral transformation of managers and executives who, at the heart of operations and decision-making, then seek to help their teams to work differently, and better, and to give meaning to the profession of “strategist” (Command in Greek).
“Success today requires the agility and drive to constantly rethink, reinvigorate, react, and reinvent.”
Bill Gates
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