How do you create an Agile organization? Evan Leybourn, founder of the Business Agility Institute, provides a quick, detailed breakdown of the domains of business Agility in this short video.

In this blog series we explore the world of Business Outcomes; turning what’s important to our business into actionable outcomes, consider outcomes as opportunities to experiment with and improve, and how we meet our outcomes best by helping our customers meet their outcomes.

As agile practitioners we are all familiar with the  Agile Manifesto and the positive impact it has had on companies, specifically in Information Technology (IT) departments around the globe. Although the Manifesto has helped us think and work differently and often in more effective and efficient ways, countless organizations continue to build products that customer don’t want or seldom use. I have worked with many companies from start-up’s to Fortune 10 organizations. The recurring question that most have no answer for is “How do we know we are building the right products for our customers?”  Peter Drucker, the founder of modern management, once said: “There is nothing so useless as doing something efficiently that which should not be done at all.”

Applying Agile in a non-profit context requires recognition of a near-universal truth: non-profits are notoriously underfunded and understaffed, leaving individuals wearing many hats and mostly in fire-fighting mode. This leaves very few resources for any type of process improvement, even when individuals and organizations are receptive to a new way of working. But this means that Agile can have tremendous benefits within the non-profit sector, even if it looks a bit different than the traditional IT-Agile models.
My initial attempt at applying Agile for non-profit began several years ago when I volunteered to help an organization with their strategic planning efforts. Having already been a volunteer in other areas, I was able to reach out to one of the leaders on their volunteer board to better understand their current planning and implementation process.