Agile working involves responding in short time-frames to changes. Those changes may be fresh knowledge that comes from new data insights, or internal re-organisations, priority changes, unplanned resource availability changes, or a host of external factors.

Traditional business planning and performance management is often carried out using an annual planning cycle, annual performance reviews, and quarterly or monthly operational and strategic reporting.

Whilst this meets the plan-do-check-act principle in some ways, it is most certainly not agile. Particularly when backward looking reporting is all that is used, this is like steering an oil tanker with a paddle.

Some teams have moved forward substantially, getting fresh data visualisations and actionable insights from stylish new self-service dashboards or data viz’s and then creating actions and tracking their delivery and their impacts to close the agile performance loop.

Continuous improvement is now delivered through agile action adjustment based on rapid cycles of monitoring, analysis, discussion, decision, action and impact transparency.

To make this agile process rapid we have to close the gaps and automate the processes. If the process is undertaken manually, with different systems in different steps, the purpose and benefits of agility evaporate.

Data comparison with expectation or plan must be continuous and automatic with no manual assessment or data collation or report creation required.

Using software like InPhase, you can identify current variance and prediction of future variance instant instantly, automatically routed to each responsible manager. Integrated discussion and action agreement and setting with no unnecessary lag, and associated directly to the performance issue is key to the speed of decision on which actions to take, and execution. Easy update and visibility of the state of action execution enables the state of the agile change to be understood by the accountable manager and impacted staff.

As the final step, InPhase can provide clear visibility of where the change action planned has been executed and the impact has been successful, or where there has not been a successful change; either because the action did not achieve the expected change, or the action was not executed well or at all.

With such integrated, seamless and automated process support for agile working, InPhase delivers a unique advantage to any organisation seeking to accommodate change more quickly than ever before and work in a more agile way.

Robert Hobbs

Chief Executive Officer

InPhase’s Chief Executive and Founder, Robert has been the visionary leading InPhase to be one of the UK's leading providers of management, governance and assurance solutions, and helping organisations align their actions and goals more easily and efficiently with InPhase's suite of integrated apps.