How it Works...
How it Works...
Developed by the Business Agility Institute, a fiercely independent research and advocacy organization, the Business Agility Profile™ is a detailed, research-based snapshot of your organization’s Business Agility capabilities & behaviors at the heart of how your organization operates.
What are we evaluating?
Our research-based diagnostic model focuses on the 18 business capabilities and 84 associated behaviors needed for excellence in business agility – organized around the 18 Capabilities within the Domains of Business Agility.
What matters is how an organization's people, systems, and processes all come together to best deliver value to their customers. Our approach is to create a detailed model of your agility based on the expression of fundamental business agility characteristics and patterns – and the variance across the organization.
- The Business Agility Profile™ takes approximately 4–6 weeks from the moment we lay the groundwork for our collaborative adventure into your organization’s Business Agility.
- The setup phase (weeks 1-2) consists of completing the NDA alongside Profile demographics & setup.
- The data collection phase (weeks 3-4) consists of the behavioral evaluation and evidence review.
- The evaluation phase (weeks 5-6) consists of benchmarking, preparing the report, and finalizing the certification award (if appropriate).
- No Personally Identifiable Information is collected or stored. This includes email addresses, passwords, names, etc.
- Unless otherwise requested by you, the evidence review will be conducted over video conference. No material will be physically shared with BAI.
- For privacy reasons, levels, functions, or custom segments with less than 5 respondents will not be reported on separately. These responses will still be included in the full report, but only as part of the overall organizational evaluation.
- Any provided information will be securely stored and only accessed by BAI staff for the purpose of the evaluation. After the evaluation, provided information will be securely deleted.
The Approach
The Business Agility Profile™ takes approximately 4–6 weeks from the moment we lay the groundwork for our collaborative adventure into your organization’s Business Agility.
STEP 1 – AGREEMENT & NDA
Given the nature of the information that we will request as part of the Business Agility Profile process, and to guarantee it is kept in the strictest of confidence, we will sign a mutual Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) with you.
STEP 2: DEMOGRAPHICS & SETUP
2a. Complete background questionnaire: Every organization has unique characteristics and, as such, the Business Agility Profile process varies depending on several key variables. Therefore, as part of the data collection process, we require some basic quantitative and demographic information. This includes data relating to; company size, industry, ownership structure, scale of operations (number of sites, time zones, & regions), work complexity, etc.
2b. Identify participants for full survey or interview profiles: For the Vitals Check version of the Business Agility Profile, formal participant identification is not required. Both the Standard Business Agility Profile and the Interview-Based Profile require a diverse set of participants from across the organization.
2c. Additional demographic questions (Survey Profiles Only): The survey platform allows for additional demographic questions to be asked of participants at the start of the survey. These questions are used to further segment results in the Profile report. Common questions include asking participants to select their Business Unit or Geographic Region.
2d. Supporting workshops (Survey Profiles Only): To compliment the surveys, BAI can run a short, 90-minute, workshop on business agility for your organization. This education will cover all the key Domains of Business Agility and, after covering specific topics, we will pause and ask the workshop participants to take 2-3 minutes to answer the relevant survey questions for that topic.
STEP 3: BEHAVIORAL EVALUATION
Depending on the information provided in the background data survey, a tailored set of assessment questions will be prepared. Questions (whether survey or interview based) assess the business agility across, amongst other things, relevant work processes, customer and employee experience, alignment between divisions and teams, and overall business strategy.
Interview-Based Profiles: For organizations that do not want to undertake surveys, equivalent behavioral insights can be gathered through a series of 1-1 or small group interviews. We ask that you try to schedule the interviews within a two week period where possible. Note: In-person interviews can be conducted on request.
Standard & Vitals Check Profiles: The survey itself is completely anonymous. Each company is given an access code that participants will use to associate their responses with the company. No personal information is ever requested or stored. If requested, we can generate multiple access codes associated with specific roles, bypassing the role selection screen.
STEP 4: EVIDENCE SUBMISSION
To validate that the behaviors of the organization are supported by the systems of the organization, we will request documentary evidence of work practices, processes, and structures. This information will be used to validate and better understand the challenges, gaps, and progress made on your business agility journey.
STEP 5: BENCHMARKING
Over 1,800 companies have taken part in various Business Agility Institute research studies. Using performance and maturity data from all of these companies as a benchmark, we can compare you against organizations of similar complexity, as well as those in the same industry and region. These 1,800+ companies represent 81 countries, 60 industries, and range in size from 4 to 400,000 employees.
STEP 6: EVALUATION & REPORTING
At the end of the evaluation period you will receive a final Business Agility Profile including a breakdown of the maturity ratings, key challenges the company is facing, trending benefits, recommended experiments and future steps, and recognition of successes to date - all evaluated against the Domains of Business Agility; the internationally recognized standard of business agility.
STEP 7: RECOMMENDATIONS & AWARD
Based on the report and prior model, the Business Agility Institute will grant the title of “Certified Agile Organization”, along with a separate distinction (“class”) publicly recognizing where your organization is on the journey to agility.
Frequently Asked Questions
We have run Profiles for organizations all around the world. And while each organization is unique, there are some common questions that emerge. We present this set of frequently asked questions (FAQ) to help address some of these.
Eligibility & Profile Process FAQ
Regardless of approach, the core of the Business Agility Profile process is a behavioral evaluation across the organization. There are three approaches through which the behavioral evaluation can be conducted. Please note that there are different costs involved for each type of Business Agility Profile.
Standard Business Agility Profile (via Survey): This approach is conducted through a series of highly targeted and specific surveys. Each survey is targeted at a specific role (between 3-10 people per role) within the company and the questions are tailored for them. Depending on the size of the organization, we are looking for between 75-250 participants – however the diversity of respondents is more important than the total.
Each survey is designed to be completed within 5-10 minutes by the target respondents without searching for external information or input.
Interview-Based Business Agility Profile: For organizations who do not wish to undertake a survey at all, we can run the Business Agility Profile evaluation via a series of 1:1 interviews. In general, interviews are 60-minutes long and conducted remotely over Zoom (or equivalent). Like the survey, interview subjects must represent a diverse cross-section of the organization. Through these interviews, we get all the information required for the evaluation without surveying 100’s of people.
Vitals Check: The Vitals Check is a fast summary version of the Business Agility Profile. It is designed to support those organizations that have challenges with running surveys; either because of survey fatigue or lack of permission to send the survey across the organization. The Vitals Check greatly simplifies the process by cutting out the evidence/documentation review and simplifying the survey so that it can be completed by 8-20 of your closest allies in the organization. This approach is designed to give you a high-level perspective and does not provide deep insights, custom recommendations, or the organizational certification.
To accurately understand business agility, we need participation from a wide range of individuals and functions. From individual contributors to senior executives and from Finance to Business Operations.
By default, the profile incorporates the entire business. From operations to HR to technology to Finance, etc. However, some functions can be excluded by exception. Speak to your primary contact at BAI to clarify. Obviously, functions that don’t exist in your organization (e.g. Sales in a Government Agency) aren’t included.
Yes, any function can be included in the Business Agility Profile at no additional cost. One profile = one cost.
We're looking for a diverse and representative cross-section of the company. No limits beyond that.
In general, no. Independent business units or countries usually have different systems and express different behaviors. We would generally do a Business Agility Profile per business. However, we will give a discount to larger organizations who would like to do multiple profiles.
There's no upper limit on how many people can respond. For the Standard Profile we need a minimum of 150 people to respond. Whereas, for the Vitals Check we need a minimum of 8 and maximum of 20.
Data Security & Privacy FAQ
Yes you can. The survey is hosted at https://certifiedagile.org/. On request, we can provide a test access code so you can review the survey.
No. For privacy reasons we do not store any identifiable information. The company will be given a unique code (for the company). They will send that code to the participants. We can generate unique codes per role (e.g. 12-15 codes per company) if they want to bypass the role question.
No. For the same reason as above, this is totally anonymous. Even BAI staff don't know who responded.
Benchmark & Certification FAQ
We have benchmark information for over 1,300 companies across nearly 30 industries including: Aerospace, Pharmaceutical, Education, Energy & Utilities, Entertainment & Media, Financial Services & Insurance, Government & Defense, Healthcare, Manufacturing & Automotive, Professional Services, Technology & Software, and Telecommunications.
While we have data for all regions and most industries separately, there aren’t enough companies in the benchmark to slice the data multiple times. However, there are a few exceptions (e.g. North American Financial Services). Please ask and we’ll confirm.
Not all organizations get certified. Organizations must have made positive progress towards business agility across multiple business functions. An organization who has anti-agile or toxic behaviors would not get certified.
The main artifact is the Business Agility Profile. This profile includes all the findings, detailed analysis, and recommendations - regardless of whether an organization is certified. The certification is the final step once the profile has been completed.
While the Business Agility Profile is free for members, it can be purchased separately by any organization. In this case, other membership benefits (like access to the library, mentorship, or tickets to the executive forum) are not included.