Formed with a vision to develop culturally and strategically aligned organizations to achieve business agility and high performing teams in the digital era, Agility Tune Up is an organisation synonymous with the journey of improving agility. Focusing on tuning up people, process and tools for high performance, the business consultancy firm is known for its expertise in transformative coaching, training and consulting towards personal, leadership and business agility.
Taking part in the global Agile 20 Reflect Festival held recently, Agility Tune up organized a webinar with experienced professional experts in agile to shed light on several topics revolving around the topic. It featured key note speaker Mr. Anura De Alwis,Corporate Visionary Leader and founder of “Talk The Walks” an innovative talk series and platform built on the vision of transforming tomorrow’s leadership and reflects issues that matter to current business challenges. Also present was Janani Liyanage, Founder of Agility TuneUp and the ambassador for Sri Lanka for Agile20Reflect. The session was moderated by Lead Agile Practitioner and Programme Manager at Virtusa (Pvt) Ltd Rohan Mehalekam.
Possessing a wealth of experience spanning 30+ years of working for some of the world’s most exemplary organizations, Anura a well-rounded corporate leader, known for his strategy, advisory, business transformation, and governance functions across Asia Pacific, Europe, and North America serving several multinational corporations, spoke on the comparatively unspoken topic of agile transformation. He touched on several challenges faced by organizations in their journey towards digital business transformation and offered valuable insights and tips on how senior leaders must embrace it to make it a differentiator.
“Agile has been seen for many years as a software development methodology, but agile methodology means a lot more, and senior leaders in organizations will gain a lot by understanding that agile methodology is an excellence tool to use, not just in IT but in the corporate boardroom” stated Anura .
He further said “Any transformation, agile, digital or HR, should come from top to bottom – the top-level must set the tone or else the entire exercise will be futile.”
He also outlined the difference between a start-up and a more established enterprise when it comes to leadership support for business transformation saying “Start-up founders are most of the time in the boards of their organizations, but when you scale up, your board tends to change and leaders are changed to have better capacity. This transition from start-up to scale-up needs agile evangelists to play an important role in selling agile and to educate an organization’s top-level about the principles, foundations and way of working with agile.”
Further explaining the importance of change management Anura said: “The trainer or the transformation lead is just one person. You also need a change manager since proper change management is key to success. Unlearning and learning is difficult, and it involves time and people, not processes and technology; you need to train and educate people and help them evolve. You have to go beyond your comfort zone to learn. You need to set your goals not just for the organization but also for every agile team relevant to the people and how they change.”
When prompted by the moderator to shed light on the strategies for boards to adopt when taking their organizations through digital transformation, Anura emphazised on the significance of unlearning and learning. “Evolving requires a lot of unlearning, and after unlearning and learning, it’s all about investing in continuous improvement,” he explained, taking examples from his own corporate experience and sharing with the audience .
Covering the key aspects on agile transformation and why organizations today should pursue it, the discussion helped the audience create a blueprint for Agile Transformation, as a road map to unlock the key to digital transformation in their organizations.