Today’s business world moves fast. New technologies and new companies are changing the game every day, and the companies that survive are the ones that can keep up. But keeping up with the changes in our business landscape isn’t just about speed. After all, we’re not always just running in one direction: we’re adapting at every moment to the latest changes in our industries. What a good company needs is agility – the ability to adapt and reposition itself quickly without sacrificing efficiency. So how do you make your company more agile? Simple: like this.
Move fast with quick communication
To adapt fast, you need information fast. And that means lightning-fast communication from the bottom of your company to the top.
In practice, this means two things. It means a great communication system: phones, emails, mobile devices. This has to be consistent across your company and has to allow quick communication between any parties that might need it.
The second thing it means is good organization. Who does each person in your company report to? How are important messages moved up and down the hierarchy? If your team has to pause and think about these things for long, your communication is too slow. And if they can’t solve the problem at all and end up not communicating at all, then your communication system is very, very badly broken. Agile companies need to communicate quickly and effectively with speedy systems through organized methods.
Your company on the go
Mobile devices are the future of computing. Cloud services allow us to access information anywhere. Uber is delivering our food now – unless we go to the food truck and order it from a restaurant with wheels. Yes, it’s all about mobility, mobility, mobility. And your company needs to be ready.
This means adding new mobile dimensions to your business plan: mobile apps, delivery services, online ordering, pop-up promotions, and more. You’ll need support for these things, of course: IT mobility services, app designers, and web designers. But that’s what we have outsourcing for. So turn to the people that can help, and keep your own company on its toes.
Best practices: your ready position
The fastest runner in a race is usually going to win. But he or she won’t stand a chance against decent competition if you force them to start facing the wrong way. The way sprinters line themselves up on the block is a huge part of the race. They’re in the ready position, properly oriented for the big moment.
Your company’s ready position is its commitment to best practices. When things change, you’ll need to have a firm foundation to move on from. That foundation needs to be in the fundamentals. It needs to be well-documented. You need safe, reliable, consistent past work in order to move on to the next thing. How can you make the next big breakthrough in computing if you haven’t used computer programming best practices in the past? Your existing code will be a mess, and you’ll have no record of the errors that show what works and what doesn’t. The same is true in other industries: best practices are your ready position, the place from which you can move in the right direction – whichever direction that is.
