Janani Liyanage and Rumesh Wijetunge, visionary Directors/Co-founders of Business Agility Tune Up (BAT), are revolutionizing business agility. With diverse backgrounds and a passion for innovation, they empower organizations in today’s dynamic landscape. They focus on unlocking innate human agility, fostering generative leadership, and crafting tailored growth strategies. Through BAT, they aim to build culturally aligned, digitally enabled organizations ready to adapt and excel amidst rapid change.
Can you share a bit about your background and any early influences that shaped your path towards becoming an entrepreneur?
Janani: Becoming an entrepreneur wasn’t my childhood dream because it wasn’t a common concept back then. Society had a singular path: good school, high marks, degree, job, and marriage. My parents, especially my mother, encouraged me to explore my interests freely. She often said, “You can be anything—a celebrity, a journalist, or an archaeologist.” Their support allowed me to choose what truly mattered to me.
Rumesh: I didn’t dream of becoming an entrepreneur, but it took its natural course. Coming from a traditional background it was common thought to work hard, get good marks, do a degree and get a job. However, the influence from seeing my mother doing her own Western Music classes, and the experiences during the early stages of my career made me pursue my passion of enabling change and helping professionals and organizations.
What specific experiences or challenges in your career motivated you to start Business Agility Tune Up and how did these experiences shape your approach to business agility?
Janani: I started my career focusing on coding, but a major agile transformation shifted my perspective to see that true engineering involves innovative solutions for complex problems and effective team collaboration. Public speaking with Toastmasters helped me embrace change, face fears, adapt to uncertainty, and appreciate continuous feedback. Transitioning from engineering to coaching highlighted the power of human intelligence in unlocking agility. These experiences inspired me to form our company, dedicated to enhancing human capital for agility and growth, believing that agility is an innate human trait we aim to unlock and develop.
How did the idea of merging companies to form BAT come about and what was the main industrial gap you aimed to address with this merger?
Janani: Rumesh and I have always valued synergy and collaboration, working together long before our merger. We waited for the right time to ensure a clear understanding of our purpose and unique industry value.
Organizations facing rapid change risk losing perspective and must embrace a generative approach over traditional structures. Constantly questioning and improving processes is vital, as past solutions may not fit future needs. Our vision is to embed agility and generativeness into organizations’ DNA, fostering a collaborative environment for sustainable growth. This goes beyond training to creating an ecosystem of transformative capabilities.
What are your immediate plans for that and what impact do you hope to achieve in the business agility landscape in the next few years?
Janani: Our long-term vision is for organizations to develop generative capabilities, enabling them to sense, respond, and adapt to exponential change. Achieving this requires cultural alignment, human capital development, and digital enablement. Over the next three years, we will focus on three areas: fostering generative leadership, developing agile organizations, and enhancing team and technology capabilities, particularly leadership skills. To support this, we offer tailored business strategy tune ups, including team agility solutions, and enterprise and leadership tune ups. These personalized tune ups help various industries transform and develop their generative capabilities.
Opening our branch in Canada is a crucial move in serving global clients and we are excited to extend our innovative solutions to them.
Were there any pivotal moments or challenges in your early career that influenced your decision to start a consulting firm focused on business agility?
Rumesh: When we hear “agility” or “agile,” it’s often linked to the IT industry. However, agility is for everyone, in any organization, from any industry. The Agile mindset should be part of the DNA of every individual, team, and solution. We noticed that in many organizations, value delivery and innovation often get stifled due to challenges in alignment, synergy, communication and collaboration, prioritization, visualization of progress, etc. Having experienced these challenges firsthand, we realized that individuals and organizations aren’t always tuned to enable effective value delivery. These insights led us to form a consulting firm focused on fostering business agility for all.
What is the core mission of BAT and how do you see it making a difference in the lives of professionals and organizations?
Rumesh: At Business Agility Tune Up, we focus on creating culturally aligned, digitally enabled, generative organizations through human capital development. Every entity—be it an individual, team, organization, or solution—goes through a lifecycle: birth, growth, maturity, saturation, and potential decline. We believe in nurturing the potential at every stage for sustained change and growth. So our mission is to offer competency development, consulting, coaching, community development, and creative solutions geared for generative enterprise tune ups. Our tailored services focus on developing human capital and fostering generative capabilities, ensuring continuous improvement and adaptability in an ever-changing business landscape.
What are the key initiatives you are focusing on for the immediate future of BAT, and what challenges do you anticipate as you work towards these goals?
Rumesh: The immediate future of BAT is primarily focused on taking the need for business agility to the world. While our rebranding activities progress we’ve even expanded our footprint to Canada.
We at BAT focus on building generative teams, individuals, leadership, and organizations through four key areas: competency development, consulting, coaching, and community development. Our DAWN model—Discover, Align, Wire, Navigate—guides this approach.
For competency development, we provide training targeting professional certifications from Scrum Alliance, Scaled Agile Inc., IIBA, PMI, ICAgile, and Management3.0, along with other customized sessions for corporates on areas of Agile ways of working and human-centred solution design. Our consultation services include end-to-end transformation interventions from strategy to execution which are galvanized through our executive leadership, and role and team-based coaching services. The immediate future revolves around community development around Agility through global-level events such as Regional Scrum Gatherings, Awards and Conferences.