3T Metric: a New Approach to Measuring Business Agility

As we all know organisational agility is important to success. That’s the reason why leading companies make business agility a key corporate attribute and learn to embrace market and operational changes as a matter of routine. Yet despite understanding the importance of agility, there is much confusion around what it actually is.

Business Dictionary defines agility as “the capability of a company to rapidly change or adapt in response to changes in the market. A high degree of organisational agility can help a company to react successfully to the emergence of new competitors, the development of new industry-changing technologies, or sudden shifts in overall market conditions.”

Forrester identifies 10 measurable dimensions that shape an organisation’s business agility:

Market dimensions

• market responsiveness
• channel integration

Organizational dimensions

• knowledge dissemination
• digital psychology
• change management

Process-focused dimensions

• business intelligence
• infrastructure elasticity
• process architecture
• software innovation
• sourcing/supply chain

On each of these dimensions, companies must demonstrate an awareness of how to be agile, and must also be able to execute in an agile way.

Measuring business agility in this way is not easy. A much simpler approach was suggested by Braden Kelley and is known as the 3T Metric: Time To Transform.

Usually, when we speak about agility, we speak about increasing the pace of change. The 3T Metric measures how long it takes an organisation to make a transformation, precisely from Point A to Point B.

• Point A = the point in time at which the organisation recognises a change is needed away from the steady state

• Point B = the point in time at which the organisation successfully arrives at the new steady state

Notice that Point A starts when the organisation recognises it needs a change (not when people agree to make a change or actually make it). It allows to increase your organisational agility by increasing the speed at which your organisation moves from recognising that the change is needed to agreeing to make it, planning and executing it.