MSMEs are a backbone of global economies - creating millions of jobs and contributing massively to GDPs (SMEs contribute more than 50% of most African GDP and an average of 60% of employment), and yet a huge percentage do not make it to their fifth year of operation.
Small and growing businesses face a myriad of challenges (and opportunities) in their lifetimes (also true to established businesses). These come about due to both internal and external environmental factors. Common internal factors posing a threat to existence and prosperity of these enterprises could be: misplaced priorities, inadequately skilled human resource, organizational culture, team dynamics among others. External factors include: advancement in technology (or digital disruption), low demand for products and services, inflation, competition, disasters, legislation that create regulatory barriers (think of high taxation laws, unfriendly legal policies, etc,.), and what have you.
This calls for a shift in approach to running the enterprise. MSMEs must become innovative by adopting practices that build their resilience and to quickly adapt and respond to emerging challenges and opportunities.
Road to business agility
It does not matter whether your business has two or 500+ employees, no one cares. Your key to survival and prosperity depends on your business agility - your ability to rapidly adapt and respond to market and environmental changes in the most productive and cost-effective manner.
Everything moves fast in a digital era. MSMEs need to be keep the pace.
Start by adopting a change culture and deliberately building a team focused on responding to changes in your customers/stakeholders needs and emerging business opportunities. Building a strong agile culture, leadership and governanance will enable you to become agile in your capability to operate, change, and support your business. The overaching goal is to deliver value to your customers, and in effect positively impacting your business returns. This means you are bound to stay in business for longer. Try the ADAPT (Awareness, Desire, Ability, Promotion, Transfer) model to change management for your transition - we have used it severally, it works.
And, whichever agile methodology or framework you settle on that works for your business, ensure you walk with the right partners to support you engrave agile practises and mindsets in your organization.
Find out how Gazelle Africa can support you in your agile journey.
By embracing agility you solidify your ability to:
- Adapt faster to changes in your environment (opportunities and threats)
- Deliver value regularly (and quickly)
- Remain customer-focused (or customer-obsessed)
- Stay resilient and sustainable
Most importantly, your transformation to business agility is a journey and a process. Be patient, trust the process.
Mistakes to avoid
- Misinterpretation of agile principles: see our article on Agile Mindset.
- Inadequate training and skills: provide coaching and training (use agile experts and coaches).
- Excessive focus on tools and processes: simply adopting agile practises and tools whithout fully embedding core agile principles and values will not make you truly agile.
- Impatience: agile tranformations don’t happen overnight, there will be challenges along the way, trust the process. Just do it!
- Inadequate or lack of support from leadership
- Failure to anticipate resistance: agile transformation is a change process. Anticipate resistance and openly communicate(multiple times) about the change.
- Misaligned incentives: align incentives (for example, consider non-monetary incentives when a particular agreed team goal is achieved).
Additional Reading and References
Gazelle Africa provides coaching to agile teams and teams transitioning to agile