“Immediately responsive, constantly improving and ready to address technological developments, unexpected customer feedback or any another unforeseen event at the drop of a hat.”
This is how we defined the agile organisation in our last post about agile working. From this, it’s possible to deduce that two of the most important qualities shared by all agile organisations are <<strongspeed and flexibility. A growing number of businesses, enterprises and public sector organisations are using the cloud to achieve both.
Operating with speed and flexibility largely depends on people being able to work together. Your organisation may contain some individuals with the ability to work fast and respond instantly in terms of their own workload, but there are limits to what even the most capable employee can achieve on his or her own. In fact, the demands of the modern working environment make it extremely difficult for many individuals to become any more productive than they are at the moment. As Marianne Calder said in her keynote at UC Expo 2015: “Individuals have been pressed and pressed, and now they can’t produce more.”
But there is still plenty of scope for improvement in the way we work as teams – whether that team is a few people, a department or an entire organisation. Calder spoke about “reinvented models of teamwork” – and that is precisely what agile working in the cloud is delivering.
So let’s go back to those twin tenets of agility – speed and flexibility – and see how a cloud collaboration tool like Kahootz can enable the agile working model.
Quick to deploy
Rapid deployment has been a hallmark of cloud computing services since their inception. Removing the need to install software, as well as the associated admin and IT support burden normally created in enterprise environments, means that cloud services have the speed advantage over traditional on-premise technologies.
Kahootz uses the speed of the cloud to provide online workspaces that can be set up and put to work in minutes. With just a few clicks, you can bring team member together and start sharing files, collaborating on documents, managing projects and hosting discussions.
Easy to adapt
Flexibility is the other side of the agile coin. Agile organisations need to respond instantly as conditions change, so software that lacks the flexibility to adapt as new teams, projects and objectives arise is effectively useless.
In Kahootz, workspaces are designed to be repurposed for different needs. It’s easy to add or remove individual tools like task lists and calendars, but users can also adapt a workspace to meet an entirely different purpose with just a few minor adjustments. For example, a procurement management workspace can become a secure area for contract negotiations and then a project management hub for ongoing collaboration with the successful bidder.
Easy to grow (scalable)
Cloud service providers have always promised users scalability. With instant access to infinitely more computing resource than organisations would ever have on-premise, the cloud is presented as the perfect platform for quick and painless growth.
However, the way many cloud pricing models are structured means that scaling up usage is often not as simple or cost-effective as it initially seems. Inflexible contracts and licence bundles can prevent users from realising the benefits of ‘pay as you go’ utility pricing (read our guest blogger Ian Moyse’s post about pricing in the cloud here).
Kahootz aims to deliver genuine consumption-based pricing to users. The objective is to support teams as they grow and extend the benefits of collaboration to their entire organisation. That means not penalising growth with restrictive pricing that forces users to pay for resource they haven’t actually used.
To find out more about agile working practices, look out for our next post on agile. Don’t forget to subscribe!
