With the speed at which technology is developing and the rate at which the world is changing, it is critical that small businesses become agile. But what are the benefits of being agile in your small business?
Being agile is about responding quickly and effectively to the ever-changing environment in which your business operates. There are four aspects to being agile.
They are:
1. Relationship building:
Agile businesses focus on the relationships between customers, the business and the employees within the business. They want to create a business where relationships and interactions are performed in an effective and efficient way.
2. A working product:
In an agile business, there is a focus on creating a product in incremental steps and getting feedback from your customers to make tweaks and improvements on the product as you develop it. You will start by offering your customer a near perfect product which then will be tweaked with the feedback from your customers.
3. Customer collaboration:
Agile businesses focus on working with customers to produce the best offering for the business and customer. They are sensitive to the needs and wants of the customer and work towards creating a product which satisfies these.
4. Change responsiveness:
Instead of being locked into a fixed plan, agile businesses are able to respond to changes quickly and accurately. They use data to make sure they respond well to the changes experienced within the business and outside of the business.
The benefits of developing an agile business are:
1. An increased market share
By creating a quality minimum viable product and releasing it quickly into the market, you are able to grow your market share rapidly. You will also be able to get feedback from your customer and integrate it into the next launch of your product. This will help you when your competitors are trying to still get their product perfect before they release it into the market.
2. Better end product
By continually testing the product in the developing staging and releasing it to the customers for feedback, you will ensure that the final product will address your customer’s needs and not disappoint them.
3. Happy teams
An agile business encourages collaboration between diverse groups to ensure the common goal of the business is achieved. They also ensure clear goals and roles are assigned to team members so that the project is completed in the best way possible. There is also a high emphasis on open communication which ensures that there is transparency within the organisation and everyone knows what the goal of the business is.
4. Decreased risk
By creating products or services in incremental steps, the potential financial risk is minimised. By being agile, the business learns to fail fast and learn from their mistakes quickly. This, in turn, ensures that the financial loss is minimised.
5. More control
Because there are regular meetings in an agile business, progress on projects can be shared, problems can be discussed and solutions can be worked out. It also helps the process to be more transparent. By having meetings at the end of each sprint the team players can work towards a better way of working together from what they have experienced in the sprint.
Therefore being agile has many benefits for a small business, especially one which is bootstrapped.
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