Enterprise Adaptability

Speed, Efficiency, and Value: Using Empiricism to Achieve Business Agility

How to frequently deliver value to customers, measure the results, and adapt accordingly with the smallest investment.

Kurt Bittner

Oct 07, 2021 • 11 min read

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Business Agility

Experimentation

Deliver Value Continuously

Validated Learning

Business-value

Summary

"We all know what “agility” is about, right? It’s about delivering faster, eliminating waste, and becoming more efficient." Kurt Bittner notes, arguing that what if that's not the fact? As many organizations that she speaks with aren't aware if they're heading in the right direction. They work incredibly hard to increase their delivery speed, but once they’ve shipped something they turn their attention to the next release. So what if most of what they just delivered turned out to be waste, or lacking in any real value to their customers? She explores this dilemma on speed, efficiency, and value through the article using empiricism to achieve business agility.

Takeaways

Efficiency is focused on eliminating non-value-added activities that prevent a team from delivering quickly, or from delivering as much value as they are capable of.
Organizations create business value when they improve customer experiences. This value may be realized in terms of increased brand value, improved revenue, increased employee satisfaction, or a variety of other measures, but the source of all value is customer experience.
Organizations improve their performance by framing their ideas as experiments that explicitly test the ideas for the value they have to customers. Running these experiments as quickly as possible, and with as little effort as possible, helps the organization to dramatically improve their effectiveness at meeting customer needs.
Organizations that don't measure the value of what they deliver have no idea which of their ideas are good, and which fail to meet customer needs. As a result, much of their time, effort, and investment may be wasted.
Setting strategic goals in terms of value helps an organization be clear about what it seeks to achieve, and helps everyone in the organization align their work toward these goals.
Speed and efficiency are typically important when an organization is certain that what it is delivering has value, because “fast” and “efficient” translate to “more profitable”.