Agile Business Strategy: Solving Challenges in 4 Key Business Areas
In recent years, businesses have been forced to continually evolve to keep up with major changes including new working models, supply chain issues, and the acceleration of digital transformation.
Today’s most successful business leaders understand they cannot afford to create and implement strategies that aren’t capable of evolution and iteration. An agile business strategy is the best way forward. It enables you to sense and respond to change in real time, evolve as needed, and create high-impact business plans. It also incorporates highly-skilled talent that’s prepared to execute strategic plans and provide value quickly.
4 Areas an Agile Business Strategy Solves Strategic Challenges
An agile business problem-solving strategy helps businesses manage change and leverage skilled talent across any strategic challenges they may encounter. Below are four examples of common types of challenges that require this approach.
1. Supply Chain Management
Major supply chain bottlenecks and breakdowns have made manufacturing and delivering products difficult. They have also negatively impacted costs, profit margins, and customer experiences. Despite these known challenges, it continues to be difficult for businesses to adjust. Although 90% of executives agree that their supply chain operations are critical to profitability and survival, only 8% consider their supply chains digitally mature.
For this reason, about 70% of organizations are now investing in the modernization of their supply chain management, often hiring independent consultants to help them gain end-to-end visibility and data insights into their supply chain and stay agile.
2. Market Research
Customer behaviors and expectations around how, where, and what they buy have changed dramatically over the last two years — 75% of customers say they’ve changed their purchasing behaviors since the pandemic began. Fast-evolving customer demands and expectations have made agile market research a key component of business success. You need to understand where your customers are now focusing on their purchasing behaviors and then inform your sales, marketing, product development, and customer-facing functions.
As Independent Market Research Consultant Margo Diewald explains, “Consumer and buyer behavior [has] changed quite a bit over the past two years. Companies need to reevaluate assumptions based on prior market research and figure out what’s coming next.”
3. Project Management
There has been a significant and persistent talent shortage in project management due to the demand for the role steadily increasing in recent years. Driven by more specialized technological know-how, project management work also continues to become more complex. Additionally, many project management professionals today are choosing to work as independent consultants. An agile project management strategy that leverages an agile talent marketplace allows you to effectively handle all of these evolving factors.
A VC-backed pharmaceutical startup recently used Catalant’s agile business problem-solving platform to submit a new drug application for one of their preclinical programs. When they found themselves lacking the internal resources necessary, the company identified a skilled project manager with experience working on this type of FDA submission to get the work done quickly.
4. Digital Transformation
Over the last two years, digital transformation has become more critical than ever before. Businesses are learning that focusing on digital transformation as one giant project is not as effective as pursuing smaller projects that better address fast-evolving market demands. If you invest in a massive, multi-year digital transformation project, your “big bet” could go bust by the time the project gets delivered. Meanwhile, a series of short-term initiatives that are expert-led can drive continual digital transformation progress — as a result, your business will remain agile and flexible.