This needs to also extend across each company’s value ecosystem, open to modifications across supply chains and business partnerships. Unfortunately, however, there is a continuing shortage of talent able to deliver such agile initiatives.

“The challenge of ensuring the availability of the right capability and capacity, at the right time, is different for agile initiatives,” notes James Fowler, Director at Match Performance; a company that has thrived at the forefront of change management for more than 20 years. “The type of people needed is different in each case, and the fast-paced, highly-interactive approaches of agile delivery require people with different interpersonal skills.”

As a specialist service under the Proteus Group umbrella, Match leverages consultancy skills, technology and an extensive network to enhance organisations’ change management agendas, and Fowler goes on to emphasise quite how difficult this now is for businesses amid the iterative, incremental nature of agile, and the uncertainty that comes along with it.

“Resources may work across multiple sprints and initiatives, utilisation becomes more complex to measure and manage, and demand can’t be predicted as far ahead,” he says. “We continue to see organisations becoming frustrated and constrained by traditional staffing models, which are no longer fulfilling many of their business needs and thus are looking for innovative solutions to compete in their sectors.
“Rigid HR processes and policies can constrain flexibility in a rapidly changing world, while hiring talent becomes a slow process. This goes against the millennial mentality which is famous for its pursuit of flexibility and fulfilment.”

Designing organisations for agility

Fowler deduces that if demand can’t be predicted as far forward then the answer lies in the speed of supply, by bringing suppliers closer to companies’ resource planning, availability and utilisation processes.

“It’s essential that organisation start taking a holistic approach of 'matching' talent to roles - not just skill-set matching, but based around knowledge, experience and personality traits,” Fowler explains. “Companies need to work with clients to develop a much better understanding of the role, levels of complexity, key characteristics, cultural imperatives, etc, to understand where a candidate matches and - critically - where they don't.”

Executives now need to design their organisations for agility, offering alternative career paths and compensation that directly reward value creation; placing individuals in an environment which allows them to operate in teams that form and disband as required.

It’s a tough step that usually requires guidance, and to this end Match’s status as the only company to use data-based software solutions to identify the right talent with agile at its core, has become vital.
“Match completes several stages for all talent, thereby allowing us to respond to clients with maximum agility,” Fowler says. “We work with organisations who have to amend strategies according to an ever-changing landscape where traditional approaches are no longer viable.

“Having a consulting partner like Match allows clients to be able to flex and scale resources to handle lower or higher volumes of work. This means that their cost structure can move up or down to meet the needs and expectations of the new normal when it comes to work levels.”

Those who have – alongside Match – successfully implemented a talent agility strategy are able to deliver change at pace; driving flexible change from the inside in response to the competitive and sometimes hostile outside world.

“Moving forward, enterprise agility will drive a realisation that all levels of an organisation need to ‘be’ agile through their structure, and ‘do’ agile, through their product development,” Fowler concludes. “For this, you need the right mindset and company DNA in order for the right skills and toolkits to work effectively.”