on Business Agility

What is Business Agility and why is it important for organizations?

Business Agility is about recognizing your organization is a single, end-to-end value delivery system operating in an ever evolving context, and having to deliver emergent solutions. Unless your business is delivering highly standardized, client-agnostic products and services it’s likely that this describes your organization, at least to some degree. 

That means that, at times, you are facing challenges in finding out what’s the right value to deliver and what are the most effective ways to deliver it. They may be practical or more systemic ones.

Business Agility involves taking a systematic, holistic view on your ways of working and operating to identify ways to improve Value, Flow, Quality, and Experience across departments, functions, teams, and people. It provides a set of key principles and techniques to do so that Incepti specializes in applying.

By embracing Business Agility, your organization can adopt ways of working that will help you optimize your value chain, optimize your operating model, become more responsive to changes in your context, deliver more effective solutions and continuously learn and improve.

How can Business Agility benefit my organization?

Business Agility is a holistic approach that helps organizations unlock further growth by looking at their business from the perspective of four key pillars: 

1. defining and working what brings the most Value to your business, 
2. ensuring you have the right end-to-end Flow to deliver it, 
3. with the right Quality, 
4. all while creating great customers and colleagues Experience. 

Identifying and addressing your challenges and opportunities in each of those perspective helps accelerate your delivery and learning cycles, reduce wasted effort, and empower teams to deliver the right things faster, all for the benefit of your clients and business.

Is Business Agility applicable outside of technology departments?

Yes. Whether or not you are a technology company, technology or IT alone is not sufficient to ensure your end-to-end Value, Flow, Quality and Experience meets expectations. Actually, business agility, to be called as such looks beyond technology and at your entire value chain.

That is why we avoid technical jargon when engaging stakeholders and focus on questions such as: What outcomes matter most for our clients or business? How can we improve our end-to-end delivery processes? what does quality means in our context and how are we performing in that filed?

While you can answer those questions and deliver improvements starting in one part of the organisation, one team, one department, one function, this should only be the start of a more holistic journey to unlock true agility.

INCEPTI Approach and Services

How do we start our Business Agility journey with INCEPTI?

An INCEPTI engagement typically begins with a Discovery and Assessment exercise, either a light one or a more in‑depth one, either proposed as a fixed-price engagement.

It is essential to understand your specific context, objectives and challenges and ensure we don’t just copy-paste practices that would not apply to you.

By the end of Discovery, you get:

• a well-articulated summary of what is your current context,
• a representation of your current end-to-end delivery chain, 
• a list of key challenges affecting your current abilities to deliver the best Value, Flow, Quality and Experience,
• and a first definition of top-level Objectives and Key Results for the next 6 to 12 months.

This forms the needed inputs to understand how to best shape and step into your transformation or improvement journey.

Do your services go beyond coaching and facilitation? Do you provide tools, training, or organizational restructuring?

Yes. Past Discovery and if confirmed as the best first step, INCEPTI typically begins with facilitating and coaching you through working sessions because, once provided the right guidance, you are the best placed to further qualify what your objectives are, what your challenges or opportunities are and what are possible actions you can take with the resources, skills and tools at your disposal.

We then propose trainings and additional working sessions on the business agility concepts you may not know yet. Those sessions dig deeper into best practices and practical ways to create systemic agility. They cover themes such as:

• defining Objectives and Key Results in line with your mission, 
• translating them into the organizational structure you need to deliver to those objectives, 
• selecting the right practices and metrics to put in place, 
• building the initial backlog of work for your teams, 
• as well as the culture that will cement all this together.

To complement this and continue the journey, we provide longer‑term management consulting and change delivery services to help you progress in your transformation while you and your teams retain the ownership of execution.

Finally, we offer specialized services such as deploying the practical tools you may miss to manage collaboration and the flow of work, build up and report on your metrics, create AI-powered knowledge bases and more.

How will you measure and demonstrate progress during the engagement?

Progress is primarily measured against your objectives and key results. We use two sets of metrics: those tied to your key results (with baselines, deltas and trends) and a simple confidence score that tracks how confident teams are in achieving each result.

We also incorporate universal flow metrics such as lead time, work‑to‑wait ratios and predictability, quality indicators like defect rates, mean time to recovery, as well as customer and employee satisfaction scores. These metrics are captured in simple dashboards so you can see both quantitative progress and qualitative confidence.

This can be complemented by continuously assessing teams or teams or teams successful application of key agility principles and turning it into easy to track scores and, more importantly, trends.

Do you rely on a specific agile framework, or is your approach tailored to each context?

We promote business agility rather than any specific framework. Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, LeSS and similar models are tools to be used where they fit, not end goals in themselves. Rather than rolling out a one‑size‑fits‑all framework, we work with you to understand your context, challenges and objectives, then experiment with practices that support your goals. We encourage teams to adopt guardrails such as cross‑functional leadership teams and regular, transparent rituals, but the exact mechanics are tailored to your unique situation.

What organizational maturity or prerequisites are required before engaging with INCEPTI?

There is no need to achieve a particular level of maturity before engaging with us. What matters is that you recognise a challenge or an opportunity in improving Value, Flow, Quality or Experience in your space.

A second important point is that you have or recognize in your leadership, an appetite for looking at those challenges or opportunities from a more holistic, systemic and cross-functional perspective. This is key to moving beyond local improvements and unlock true agility.

How long does it typically take to see measurable impact?

Measuring progress on your key results, key metrics and key agility principles and seeing trends only takes a few weeks to setup, report and reflect on to define the next actions.

In addition, the approach itself includes defining concrete key results to achieve monthly, quarterly and yearly.

The rest is function of your organisation’s starting point, commitment and focus on sponsoring, deploying and adopting new ways of working. We will work with you to set realistic expectations based on your context.

What makes INCEPTI different from other agile or management consultancies?

We bring people, practices and tools usually only available to very large organizations or large budgets and make them accessible to you thanks to the experience and practical mindset of our team of seasoned professionals.

We also focus on providing pragmatic guidance rooted in your context and your needs, no one-size-fits-all or cookie cutter implementation.

We also adopt a systemic perspective few offers and ensure that the choices you make on which first concrete actions are fully informed.

All of it is done in full transparency, partnership and ensuring we continuously have an open and true dialog on how to best progress and help you.

Our focus is on building a sustainable evolution of your ways of working, not on delivering a one‑off project. Your long-term success is the prerequisite to Incepti success and that’s how we continuously approach our engagements.

Going deeper on making agility happen

How do you secure leadership buy-in and ongoing sponsorship for business agility programs?

We combine top-down and bottom-up actions to build the momentum required. That’s why our team is composed of seasoned professionals with the skills, experience and willingness to engage at both leadership and team level to create that context for success.

Starting at the top of your scope or change space, leadership support is essential for business agility and change. Recognizing this, we do require a strong, engaged sponsor for every engagement.

Then, engaging with both leadership, management and operational teams we start by generating quick wins using energizing workshops, creating transparency on outcomes and learnings. The objective is for leaders and teams to see and feel the benefits early on as well as understand what an agility based approach is.

We then help you communicate these successes widely to build momentum and expand sponsorship.

As initiatives grow, we introduce more formal metrics, additional mechanisms such as communities of practices and continue coaching and helping teams and leaders to sustain the change.

How do you help organizations transition from traditional methods (e.g., waterfall) to more agile ways of working?

We start by conducting a Discovery exercise to understand your current ways of working and identify your biggest challenges. It is entirely possible that, at least for some type of work, your current delivery methods are perfectly fine and that the challenges are elsewhere.

Based on Discovery, we define a set of objectives and key results together that do require taking a more agile approach to be successfully address, We then form a small, persistent team of your people, people with the right skills and who are willing to experiment new ways of working.

We coach this team to tackle one challenge at a time—delivering, learning and adapting as they go. Early successes are shared broadly to inspire others, and the change is gradually extended to additional teams or departments where it makes sense. All along, strong, engaged sponsorship underpins the entire journey.

How do you overcome resistance and fear in command-and-control cultures?

Overcoming resistance in command‑and‑control cultures begins with dialogue, education and transparent communication about what business agility means and the quick wins it can deliver.

We often start small, first building trust both with leadership and management as well as with the teams and people on the ground.

We help both focus first on what stye can control or influence now, setting pragmatic objectives and key results. This helps deliver early successes in improving Value, Flow, Quality or Experience thanks to training and coaching them to adopt best practices in business agility. Those naturally influence people and teams to shift from their existing ways of working.

Our Incepti practitioners take some of the needed conversations to a 1-to-1 level, ensuring we can have open and true conversations wither either leaders or team members on how they can evolve their ways of working to create a better context for success.

How do we measure flow, identify bottlenecks and manage work-in-progress?

To measure flow we first make work visible, capturing it in a workflow tool or even a spreadsheet. We then track the total time from when work begins to when value is delivered and calculate flow efficiency (work time divided by total time).

Other key metrics include work‑in‑progress (the number of items currently being worked on), throughput (items completed per period), lead time and predictability.

We coach leadership teams to limit work‑in‑progress to improve focus and to examine where work is waiting along the end‑to‑end journey in order to identify and remove bottlenecks.

What is the difference between enterprise-wide agility and local agility, and how do you scale it across the organization?

Local agility improves ways of working within a single team or department. Enterprise‑wide agility or Business Agility elevates the conversation to the entire value chain and customer journey, involving cross‑functional teams that span multiple functions such as Sales, Customer Experience, Development, Operations and more as applicable to your business. 

To scale agility across the organization you need leadership sponsorship and willingness to experiment with new ways of working such as assembling and empowering persistent, cross‑functional teams of teams, aligning them around shared objectives and key results, and gradually expand the scope as successes accumulate. It’s about connecting and empowering the people who deliver value across the whole end-to-end journey, not just optimizing isolated parts.