In the beginning of October, Scaled Agile released its SAFe 5.0 Framework. The updated framework places enhanced emphasis on Enterprise Business Agility, stating that it “…lets you capitalize on emerging opportunities by empowering you to make quick decisions, allocate money, and align the right people to do the work”.

So what is Enterprise Business Agility and why is it important?
Enterprise Business Agility is about moving beyond Agile transformations, where focus is mainly on IT’s delivery to the business, and onto focusing more on holistic agility throughout the organization. According to AgilityHealth, this is important because “focusing only on delivery optimization hasn’t achieved the intended business outcomes most executives and leaders were aiming for”.

So are we ready for this shift in focus? We recently asked Danish companies to rate their Enterprise Business Agility maturity as they participated in a successful Agile customer event. Here’s how they answered.

We’re good at managing our lean portfolios – but it’s hard to make the agile behavior stick
The results from our survey showed that the respondents were confident about their lean portfolio management, their customer engagement, and their agility metrics. On the other hand, the respondents were least confident about their ability to make the agile behavior stick in the organization – and primarily their ability to attract agile talents.

In general though, the Enterprise Business Agility maturity ratings we collected were ranking between ‘crawl’ and ‘walk’, indicating that there is still room for improvement in many Danish companies when it comes to Enterprise Business Agility. We welcome the shift in focus and look forward to supporting your holistic approach to agility going forward.