The Importance of Connecting Agile to Business Value

One of the biggest reasons agile fails to take root inside these organizations is resistance or hesitation from their executive teams.

Executives are under immense pressure to ensure their organizations’ stability, profitability, and growth. Their hesitation toward Agile often comes from a place of caution, rooted in a preference for traditional methods that provide clear metrics and established processes. Agile, focusing on flexibility, iterative processes, and continuous improvement, can appear chaotic and unreliable to those responsible for delivering on strict deadlines, budgets, and market expectations.

This gap in understanding is a primary reason why executives may be reluctant to embrace Agile. They may perceive it as a risky shift that could disrupt the order and predictability they’ve worked hard to maintain. However, this is where your role becomes crucial. By framing Agile to align with their priorities, you can help close this gap in confidence, minimize the cognitive dissonance your executives might feel, and help them see how agile can help them achieve their strategic business goals.

In this article, we’ll explore the minds of your executives and talk about some of the tactics you can use to begin speaking their language so that you can build trust and goodwill with them and, ultimately, turn them into the champions for change you need them to be.

The Power of Empathy and Alignment

Making agile tangible for executives starts with empathy.

Understanding the pressures and challenges they face is the first step to aligning the benefits of agile with the things that matter to your executives. This understanding should guide how you present Agile—not as a different way of working but as a strategic initiative to help them reach their goals.

In our experience, executives are typically charged with improving predictability, quality, cost savings, product fit, early ROI, and innovation or some combination. So to get the attention and sponsorship needed to make real change it’s important to connect agile and transformation activities to the outcomes they are responsible for in a clear and meaningful way.

How to Communicate the Value of Agile to Executives

Instead of emphasizing the team-level aspects of Agile like Scrum, standups, retrospectives, Kanban boards, and burndown charts, focus on how Agile practices can improve predictability, reduce risks, lower cost, and enhance the company’s ability to respond to market changes.

One practical approach is to discuss how agile contributes to achieving your executive’s desired business metrics. For example, you could show them how minimizing the need to manage dependencies allows them lower costs by reducing or redeploying headcount. Another example would be to demonstrate how improving prioritization will free up capacity to work on high-value initiatives rather than constantly working on spikes and technical debt. Or how frequent releases accelerate revenue generation and decrease time to ROI.

You can make a compelling case for agile by ensuring the activities of agile tie back to something that your executives care about.

How to Build Trust with Executives

Often, agile transformation meets resistance from executives who fear the risks associated with change. To overcome this resistance, you must focus on creating safety for the executives and the organization. Building trust is essential, and it requires a thoughtful approach that aligns Agile practices with the business’s strategic goals.

One of the first steps in creating safety is to align on purpose. Work with executives to define clear, strategic objectives that Agile practices will help achieve. This alignment helps ensure that the transformation is considered essential to the organization’s success rather than an optional or risky endeavor.

Once the purpose is aligned, the next step is to devise a credible plan for Agile implementation. This plan should focus on small, incremental changes that can be measured and evaluated regularly. Starting with a defined scope targeted at a tangible outcome lowers the risk. Demonstrating success quickly builds trust with executives who will become more willing to continue to invest gradually expanding the scope of the transformation.

Transformation is an investment, and the results of that investment need to be communicated on a regular cadence. Transparency with regards to progress, challenges, and successes further builds trust through accountability. Regular proactive communication about how transformation activities are driving the overall performance of the organization is what will sustain executive engagement.

Trust isn’t built overnight. It requires consistent demonstration of results and a commitment to following through on promises.