The Heart, Art, and Science of Making Corporate Functions More Agile

A lot of leaders take transformative steps to reenergize organizations and people. But the business prospects during COVID-19 have built hopes for enterprises that the pandemic will finally give way to a turning point.

Leaders become forward thinkers to the extent of larger business opportunities. Most importantly, these larger business opportunities aim at realizing organizational models for the way business operates and grows. It is gradually becoming a type of intense pressure for leaders to bring a change to a much larger organizational dynamic.

They are missing out on the soft parts of organizational dynamics that directly impact the larger organizational aspects. Be it the core portions of decision-making efforts or the kind of tech adoptions, familiarization, and coordination between each department in your organization.

When you have powerful technologies that can impact your business purpose, why not leverage their benefits? I am pinpointing cutting-edge diagnostics technologies, cloud-based solutions, DevOps, Blockchain, and other tech trends for successful business commitments.

Let’s discuss what this means for your corporate polestar!

Synthesize Corporate Center that Can Flex

Thoughtful implementation of agile development models is the best practice for turbo-fast decision making, precise focus on business priorities, and inter-departmental ideology.

Enterprises are so involved in transforming business models and processes, that they are now lagging behind to get an edge over the pace of transformation in corporate functions.

When I talk about corporate functions, it also includes general and administrative functions like finance, legal, HR, or material procurement. I have spent years diverting my complete focus on efficiency enhancement and cost optimization and here’s what I have discovered.

The administrative leaders from large companies struggle with successful coordination between departments or, as I consider it, coordination between functions. It’s a chain reaction at the end. Inconveniences in corporate functions gradually slow down the capacity of decision making resulting in obstacles to mobilize resources for other crucial business issues.

Be it a startup or a large-scale enterprise, leaders needs to embrace agile metrics and operating model to exhaustively optimize and scale general and administrative functions. A new model concept that promptly supports departments to withstand rapidly changing situations in the technology world.

I have touched the core of new ways of working and analytics. Undoubtedly, it’s a tried and tested practice to capitalize on the commitment of digital disruption. Indeed! Technology has made everything on-demand with the adoption of low code no code, CI CD, Metaverse, and the list goes on. It’s becoming a survival game for businesses to fully embrace agile workflows in their organizational hierarchy.

As per the McKinsey survey 2022, 90% of CXOs believe the powerful driver for a digital-first change will be the corporate centers and 70% of executives expect the corporate functions to be more agile and relevant to their emerging demands.

Corporate centers should have a stable backbone to address change for the standard operations. It should have a prime and supreme role to play in order to realize and successfully adapt to change in the most agile way possible.

Making Agility a DNA of Corporate Functions

Corporate operations should be transformed the technology way, in a fashion that discards backlogs traditionally experienced across and between departments. It should also address the need to infuse technology advancements that can magnify the centricity between customers and your business.

The best part is that the agile corporate functions offer a range of approaches. Some of which are:

• Self-managing teams
• Performance metrics
• Virtual collaborations
• Automated quoting processes
• Cross-functional teams
• Optimizing HR generalist roles
• Dynamic resource capacities
• Strategic business partnering
• Administrative functions

These soft aspects of organizational dynamics require strategic support of leaders along with highly digitized business processes. There is a growth map highway for businesses investing their time, energy, money, and skills in functionally aligned agile operations.

Some of these functions can be pulled into small chunks of work requests handled by a single person. While other corporate functions can be pulled by cross-functional teams to work on priorities and complex projects that demand varied skills and resources. And this approach of agile resourcing should be reviewed and transformed regularly as per the pace of your enterprise growth.

The above infographic will help to get a bird's eye view of which hierarchy, functions, departments, and processes to focus on the highest priorities. Let’s nosedive into the fundas for making the corporate operations more agile.

How to induce AGILE to corporate functions?

• Wholly altruistically define the type of work performed by teams or departments
• Prioritize legitimate issues at the right time in the right way
• Best match resource skills with your business demands
• Invest in skill enhancement and robust capability building

Turn Corporate Functions into Business Values

Amplify the transformation impact by analyzing efficiency and performance within and across functional teams. Secondly, it’s more leveraging to build shared-service centers. Leaders need to reorganize these shared-service centers to capitalize on economies of scale.

Additionally, invest in business dynamics where your strategies are focused, you can do it through zero-base principles. These principles address your courage to challenge business approaches along with high control over planning and spending processes across your enterprise operations.

Lastly, I would like to spotlight the magic recipe for successful leverage of business values. It’s the ‘digital capability integration’ that is cooked with a rich ingredient called ‘automation at scale’.

Smartly recognize which corporate functions will serve values from automation and digital technologies. That’s it! You are all set for becoming a future-ready and an agile enterprise. Its high time leaders should tap into a new trend of value pools.

Our digital transformation services are an epicenter to gain business values of a high standard!