Business agility is your ability to pivot quickly in the face of unpredictable or unexpected change. An agile business can respond quickly and effectively to both internal and external opportunities/threats.
Here are four ways your business can become more agile:
While an agile culture will obviously help your business pivot on demand, moving to such a business model might unsettle some of your team who are more accustomed to traditional methods of working. That’s why before you implement change, you need to do the following:
By leading from the front and getting your employees on board by proposing value to them, you’ll be on your way to creating a culture that embraces change. You can read more on the importance of having effective change management strategy by clicking here.
To make intelligent decisions quickly, you need reliable data. So, when data is scattered across multiple systems, the chances of errors happening increases. Erroneous data is even more likely if it needs to be manually pulled from system, standardised, and then uploaded into another system on a regular basis.
With professional services automation (PSA) tools, you can centralise all your data from multiple sources into one location, making it easier for employees to find what they need. This also gives you a single source of data truth, meaning everyone in your organisation can share and collaborate on the same version of documents.
It’s also vital your data is easily available in real-time. This helps you make critical business decisions quickly, such as whether to reassign personnel to a different project or not.
With advanced reporting tools in PSA software, you can create customised dashboards and generate regular reports. This gives you a more complete view of your organisation and allows you to make changes with greater confidence.
The amount of data created, captured, copied and consumed continues to grow, which means we need more space to keep it safe. While investing in a new on-premises server will hold all your data and employees work today – what about in a year’s time? You’ll be upgrading it sooner rather than later which will be costly.
On the other hand, if all your data was on the cloud and you’d run out of space after 12 months, it’s easy to scale your cloud storage. You can simply upgrade your account and the vendor – who will be hosting your data – will make the changes live within minutes.
As well as setting up your system, they’ll handle all the maintenance costs and effort (including functional and technical updates), keep track of updates and release patches when necessary. This means your company will always be on the latest system version, giving you a competitive edge.
Other benefits include:
You can read more into the benefits of cloud computing here.
With the right solution in place, you’ll become a more agile business that can react quickly to improve its internal processes.
Business agility gives you the opportunity to see where improvements can be made to your service. One way you can do this is by using big data and analytics to help aid your decision making.
PSA tools can help you collect better quality data by:
This gives you an advantage over those businesses who are basing their decisions off a gut feeling and are effectively throwing darts with their eyes closed. Analytics also allow you to spot trends in customer feedback. This means you can use these findings to directly address their concerns rather than you having to guess what they want.
Being agile is all about expecting, managing and embracing change. Businesses need to be agile now more than ever to respond to changing market demands. But agility isn’t a one-time project. It’s a never ending cycle. In our checklist, we cover the five key stages to achieving business agility in the professional services industry.
Download it below.