How to Pivot and Take Advantage of Opportunities

Scrum is a path to business agility

Organizations adopt Scrum to achieve business agility so they can manage uncertainty and risk in complex environments to achieve their goals. Scrum helps deliver high-value creative solutions in increments of value over short periods (no longer than a month), called Sprints. 

The framework depends on having a clear vision and an understanding of what you want to achieve. It requires embracing an agile mindset, which involves collaboration, flexibility, team empowerment and a willingness to experiment in the face of possible failure to navigate uncertainty and enable continuous improvement. 

So, how do you know if you’re getting the value you deserve from Scrum? Let’s turn to the three questions that can help you determine that.

1) Are you getting a return on investment soon enough?

Whatever product or initiative your organization undertakes requires a discussion about the expected return on investment (ROI). Business owners and organizational leaders must decide where best to invest their staff and resources. 

Delivering features and functionality your customers want and find valuable sooner significantly benefits your bottom line. Rather than tying up large amounts of budget for a long time without getting any return, using Scrum as intended by its creators allows you to deliver value incrementally and get some returns along the way.

Even if your product is not sold to customers but instead used internally, it can still have ROI.  For example, you can measure value in terms of time saved, new customer services, or improved job satisfaction.

2) Do you have enough transparency, flexibility and control over investment decisions?

Scrum gives the organization transparency, flexibility and control over investment decisions because it focuses on delivering a small slice of usable value every Sprint. This limits the investment risk to a shorter time frame.  

Having a usable Increment every Sprint also enables frequent feedback and assessment of changes in your environment, allowing you to validate that you are moving in the right direction and honing in on the desired outcomes. If not, you can pivot. Sometimes the best decision is to stop investing in an initiative. The sooner you stop, the better because there won’t be as much waste. You haven’t tied up people and resources for months or years before discovering that what you created missed the mark or is no longer needed.

3) How easily can you change direction to take advantage of opportunities and respond to risks?

Another way to word this question is, “How much waste will you have if the organization needs to stop investing in initiative A and pivot to initiative B?” There will likely be some waste, but you can work in a way that reduces that waste. And that also helps us avoid getting stuck in the sunk cost fallacy.

When you are not bound to projects and initiatives with long time horizons before realizing any value, it’s much easier to change course. By delivering value in shorter cycles, you’ve realized whatever ROI you could, putting the organization in a better position to shift resources to take advantage of new opportunities that arise or respond to risks.  

Innumerable circumstances require organizations to change how they invest their people and resources. Emerging markets, changing customer behaviors, new revenue streams, technological breakthroughs, and adapting business operations to meet new needs or world circumstances are just a few examples. Being able to respond to these conditions quickly is the ultimate competitive advantage. 

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