Agility – anyone who is anyone works in an agile manner. Daily status meetings take place standing up, neon-colored post-its are stuck on task boards, rigid planning, extensive documentation, and waterfall models are a thing of the past. But is that enough to be agile? What characterizes agile work? What are agile organizations? Let's take a closer look at that today.
Definition: Agility
Agility is not new, yet the term keeps popping up. In the course of new work and co. it has gained new momentum.
Originally, agility comes from the software industry. The VUCA world as well as the New Economy (i.e., the transformation of a commodity economy to a (primarily web-based) service economy) have placed high demands on programmers that could not be well reconciled with previous rigid structures. This led to displeasure and to a group of rebellious developers writing the "Agile Manifesto" in 2001. It describes 12 principles and the following four core values of agility:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
Working software over comprehensive documentation.
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
Responding to change over following a plan.
It is about making work processes leaner, less bureaucratic, and at the same time focusing more on people; on the one hand, on developers and their work environment, and on the other – as the top priority – on the customer with his needs.
With these values, agile quickly found followers and was adopted in other industries and disciplines as well.
What is agile working?
Agile working methods allow project teams to react quickly and flexibly to changing requirements, such as those dictated by the customer or the market. The final product is not predefined, but rather a vision. Instead of a rigid roadmap to get there, the work process takes place in many self-contained cycles. After each cycle, the status quo is discussed in the project team and with the customer, and based on the review, the next cycle begins – until a satisfactory final product is achieved, eventually.
Numerous agile working methods have developed. Among the best known and most commonly used are SCRUM, Kanban, OKR and Design Thinking. A good overview of agile methods, including the respective technical terms, can be found here.
Agile working methods flourish particularly well in agile organizations. However, pure application of agile methods does not make an organization agile per se. Above all, an agile organization is characterized by an agile mindset that sees change as an opportunity and enjoys innovation – at all levels of the organization. This is not always easy, because especially in our volatile, dynamic world, many people carry a strong desire for security and consistency. This makes successful change management all the more important when an agile transformation is planned; for entire organizations, for example, the SAFe scaling framework can be used.
The leadership and corporate culture of agile organizations are geared towards cooperation at eye level, the opposite of outdated Taylorism-based hierarchical structures with top-down instructions. The focus is on self-organization, autonomy, and trust/appreciation. Transparent and continuous communication supports this. Examples of agile organizations are Swisscom, Google, LinkedIn or Zynga.
Agility in Recruiting: Agile Recruiting
Agility is a promising answer to the increasing speed that has moved into the service sector, and this also applies to the recruiting industry. Agile recruiting can improve communication and make the recruiting process more efficient.
The search for experts is an appropriate context to use agile methods to advantage. To give just a few examples to illustrate:
Candidate Backlog: Summarizes requirements for the position/candidate profiles; we do not yet know the actual "end product" (the person) in advance.
Taskboards: Visualization of the search processes (in themselves as well as parallel processes).
Daily standup meetings: Short daily meetings to keep the team up to date.
Sprints (Cycles): Research cycle at the end of which you send suitable profiles to the client.
Sprint Review: Based on a customer review, a new research cycle is started if there is still a need. (= Strong orientation towards customer needs.)
Work structure: Self-organization of the recruiting consultants in specialized teams and high autonomy of each individual consultant.
User Stories: All stakeholders of the vacancy (departments) formulate their expectations of the person who is to fill the position. Based on this, interview guidelines are also formulated, based on which all candidates are asked the same questions. This enables a structured evaluation process.
This list of agile tools and methods in recruiting is not exhaustive. Rather, it is meant to illustrate that agile work is often done quite intuitively – presumably, some people don't even know that they use agile methods (in recruiting as well as in all other industries).
Dominik Pauli, our Business Manager ICT Consulting & Projects, says on the topic of agility: "We all have to be agile, and we have to be agile every day, whether in business or in our private lives. Changing framework conditions as well as various environmental factors require that we can react quickly to a new situation. In the IT environment, agile methods (for example Scrum) offer the great advantage that an initial result (for example a prototype of an application) can be presented to the customer within a useful time period. The solution is then further developed in so-called sprints and the product owner accepts the implementation of the previously prioritized requirements after each sprint. This prevents the customer from having to wait until the end of the project for the solution, the project budget to be used up, and all those affected and involved to realize at the end that the result does not meet the customer's expectations.
In my opinion, however, not every project is suitable for agile methods. For example, to move a DataCenter from A to B, I would rather choose a traditional project method that includes different phases and milestones, such as Hermes.
Depending on the type of project, a hybrid model is also an option: for example, the project is handled in phases, but the solution development, being the predefined delivery outcome, is done in an agile manner. It is important to determine the appropriate method for a project type together with the customer before starting the project."
In employer branding, the term agility is often used to attract the Generation Y. After all, it stands for modernity, flexibility, humanity – values that are particularly popular with the highly courted Gen Y and Z generations of workers.
Agility at Coopers
The previous section has highlighted the added value that agile methods can generate in recruiting. We at Coopers have recognized this as well. Our corporate values – humanity, innovation, flexibility – align beautifully with those of agile.
People come first in our work: from customer to employee to candidate. For us, the customer is king and we like to go the extra mile to deliver a world-class service experience. We value a pleasant, collegial working atmosphere, give our employees plenty of room for personal responsibility, and treat all candidates with respect, regardless of their status in the recruitment process.
Innovations are drivers of the future. We see agility as an opportunity to drive the digital transformation of the (working) world. We are inquisitive and see a privilege in learning with and from each other. When new insights lead us to take a different direction, we do it. Together, as a team, very flexibly. We live this flexibility externally towards clients and candidates as well as internally towards our employees, for example in the sense of flexible working time models. People have different preferences, and that also applies to the way they work. Because we take this into account, we have such a competent, high-performance team – which, among others, happens to place specialists in agile methods and agile transformation.
Feel free to see for yourself. Just drop us an email if you are interested in the topic of agile or follow our journey on Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing and Instagram. We look forward to the exchange.
Your Coopers Team
Photo by Patrick Perkins on Unsplash
