HHS’ 2022-2026 Strategic Plan states:
“HHS supports strategies to reduce costs, improve quality of healthcare services, and ensure access to safe medical devices and drugs for everyone.”
Organizational agility is an enabler that can help achieve the above objectives. Organizational agility is defined as “ a set of organizational capabilities, behaviors, and ways of working that affords your organization the freedom, flexibility, and resilience to achieve its purpose. No matter what the future brings.”
The landscape of federal health IT had already been undergoing a shift, from being one tool in a healthcare box to being a complex network of interoperable healthcare delivery systems. However, the progress has been slow and costly due to outdated processes, lack of understanding of the user needs, and the ability to respond to change. The COVID-19 pandemic made this apparent and became a powerful driving force behind rapid advancements and structural changes in federal health IT. This accelerated innovation and transformation in several key areas, like telehealth, digital public health initiatives, cloud computing, and AI utilization.
Characteristics of Organizational Agility
The core qualities and characteristics of an agile organization are a balance of a stable foundation and adaptiveness, which provide predictive, yet innovative approaches and solutions for the end user. An agile organization will deliver greater innovation and value through the following:
- Better ways of working
- Relentless collaboration
- Focusing on employee satisfaction
- Focusing on the speed of (product or service) delivery
- Prioritizing customer satisfaction
- Maintaining an agile mindset
- Enabling adaptive leadership
The realization of these organizational characteristics enables the organization to realize its true goals, which are the delivery of greater customer value through innovation and agility.
The majority of organizations today are structured and operate based on models that were established decades ago. These models were originally designed to prioritize control and stability, rather than fostering innovation, quick action, and flexibility. Simply making minor adjustments to the current management practices, strategic planning, and execution methods is no longer adequate for organizations to stay relevant in today’s fast-changing environment.
The evolution to the new organizational structures requires a good deal of cultural and operational discipline and change. Innovation and perspective must be ingrained in everyday thinking, along with continuous improvement through constant retrospective and reassessment of desired outcomes. Therefore, the pillars of Organizational Agility are built around the following:
- Design based on value and the most favorable outcomes for the customer
- Lean management to increase value creation
- Agile delivery to deliver that value rapidly
- Change management to help the corporate culture evolve to support the model
Innovation Driven by Organizational Agility
Organizational agility fosters a culture of continuous improvement and learning, where new ideas are not only encouraged but are also swiftly implemented and tested. More importantly, a cross-functional teamwork that brings together diverse perspectives and expertise that are crucial for innovative problem-solving.
In essence, organizational agility creates an environment where innovation is not just an occasional breakthrough, but a consistent and integral part of the organizational fabric, leading to sustainable growth and competitive advantage.
Agilious Experience
Agilious has been instrumental in developing an enterprise-wide, web-based solution that is reliable, maintainable, and scalable, for a Federal Health Agency. Our approach has enabled the organization to operate with more agility and the ability to respond to the needs of their users and stakeholders. In addition to the Agency applying an agile mindset, the agility has been enabled by leveraging agile scrum framework for rapid incremental development, Azure Cloud technology for scalable infrastructure, and Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline with built-in security testing, using an automation-first approach for quality, security, and compliance.
Leveraging these practices, the Agency has able to rapidly respond to new, emerging needs of the Agency’s mission and users.
Call to Action
We invite all stakeholders in federal health IT to embrace the power of Organizational Agility, and join us in this journey towards a more agile, innovative, and efficient future. Together, we can deliver more accessible and value-driven healthcare.
Have you been using agile in your federal health IT initiatives? We will love to hear from you.