HR in an agile world

How can HR respond quickly and flexibly to our organisations’ ever-changing needs? Cheryl Tansey, international agility coach, seeks to find the answers.

Hands up if you’ve heard the Agile word mentioned recently. Keep those hands up if you still have no idea what it really means! It’s okay; you’re not alone. Originally designed to help teams deal with the fast pace of digital innovation, Agile grew in the IT department during the early ‘90s, based on a need to respond faster to change.

How quickly can you respond

During the early ‘90s, the average life cycle of IT projects was about three years. In some industries, many more. This meant it took three years from when a business need was validated to when the IT team could hand over something that would (hopefully) work and would (hopefully) meet that business need.

History shows us that things change a lot over three years, especially in IT. As a result, major software projects became delayed, abandoned or, if they did go live, the customer often didn’t want or need it anymore.

Some of our largest organisations in New Zealand during that time, in both the private and public sectors, experienced these challenges. So we know first hand how expensive and frustrating it can be to wait three years to discover that what we asked for is not what we are getting.

How flexible is your planning?

Planning, predicting and setting goals continue to be an incredibly important part of delivering value in Agile. Provided our plans can flex.

With change happening faster than ever before, and as we enter the fourth industrial revolution, artificial intelligence and robotics are creating change for humans at every corner. So flexibility in our planning is fast becoming our competitive advantage.

No longer can we predict three years in the future what our businesses will need, nor can we predict what our customers may want. We need to be able to respond to a changing market.

What role does culture play in Agile?

Agile is more than just a new process, team structure or way to work. Agile is a cultural shift in the way we think about people.

Agile is a cultural shift in the way we think about people.

When the Agile Manifesto was created in 2001, the primary goal was to uncover better ways of developing software by discovering better ways to work. To change the way we work, we must first change the way we think.

The entire Agile movement is based on just four simple values:

1. individuals and interactions over processes and tools

2. working software over comprehensive documentation

3. customer collaboration over contract negotiation

4. responding to change over following a plan.

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

These four values form the foundation of the many Agile frameworks, methods and artefacts that teams around the world now use. In fact, the five largest organisations on the planet, in terms of market capitalisation, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft, all value responding to change over following a plan.

How does Agile move beyond IT?

Throughout New Zealand, organisations are adopting this new way of working in all areas of their business. This includes finance, policy, legal, marketing, operations, communications and, most importantly, our HR teams.

HR teams are a vital contributor to designing our culture, developing our people, and shaping the way we work.

Across all of our major banks, telcos and energy providers, as well as many of our government organisations, HR is now taking a seat at the table in these Agile transformations and being asked to contribute to the conversation of agility.

What does this mean for HR?

The scope for HR, to enable organisational agility, is widereaching. In my research, I have discovered eight, high-value themes for HR teams to focus on.

Eight themes of Agile HR:

1. organisational design, roles and career paths

2. Agile leadership3. learning culture4. employee experience

5. value-based recruitment and onboarding

6. enabling performance

7. incentives, rewards and compensation

8. the Agile mindset in HR.

Where do we start?

To increase the agility of your organisation, I recommend starting with your team first.

Here are a few easy ways to get started.

• Educate your HR team on Agile: Support the specialist learning that your team will need.

• Run an experiment: Choose an Agile framework to test with your team and see what you learn (then iterate on it).

• Get an Agile coach for your team: This will fast track your learning and help overcome challenges as they arise.

• Co-create with your employees: Ask for input and feedback on current work your team is delivering and see what kind of response you get.

Educate your HR team on Agile: Support the specialist learning that your team will need.

As with all change, small regular adjustments to our daily habits create long-lasting embedded change. I challenge you to think of one thing you could do differently tomorrow, to begin shifting your own personal agility.

Cheryl Tansey is an international agility coach on a mission to revolutionise and humanise the way we work. Her primary focus is on developing people agility within fast-changing organisations. As the founder of the Ministry of People, she delivers in-house and public training on Agile HR as well as training and mentorship for Agile coaches. Want to learn more? Visit cheryltansey.com and keep an eye out for new education programmes landing early 2020.