The Agile engineering method of iterative design allows more agility in product development. But it's certainly not equivalent to organizational agility.

In fact, many "scalable Agile frameworks" are the antithesis of agility. They assign fixed teams of developers to continually enhancing existing products (often without concern for ROI), leaving little room for new strategic initiatives, new technologies and disciplines, and shifting enterprise priorities.

What is real organizational agility?

Real agility means that an organization is able to quickly reconfigure its talents and capabilities to address rapidly changing challenges, opportunities, and strategies.

For each project or service, agile organizations can assemble teams of just the right specialists from anywhere in the organization (not a fixed team of generalists). Within these cross-boundary, multi-disciplinary teams, accountabilities are clear -- both for the entire initiative and for each of the sub-components to be delivered by each of the members of the team.

Note that every group can supply talent to multiple teams. That allows a higher degree of specialization, which leads to higher performance.

Also, agility means that priorities can be adjusted quickly. Budgets which are based on prior years' spending constrain resource agility. It's hard to fund strategic initiatives and innovation, regardless of the payoff, when budgets only look at what was spent in the past, not the investment-opportunities in the year ahead.

And within fiscal years, agility requires a demand-management (project intake) process that adjudicates priorities within the constraints of existing budgets throughout the year. Priorities must be set for the entire service-provider organization, not independently for each group (which undermines cross-boundary teamwork).

Ultimately, organizational agility depends on organizational structure, resource-governance processes, culture, metrics -- the entire organizational operating model. And that's achieved through organizational transformation, not just a new engineering method.

If you're sincerely interested in organizational agility, the Market Organization is the ultimate in an agile, scalable, high-performing organizational operating model.

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