Agile Glossary

Enterprise Agility

What is Enterprise Agility?

Enterprise agility is the capacity to adapt at scale without losing coherence—to decide quickly, redirect resources deliberately, and keep strategy actionable under real-world pressure.

Agile enterprises build change readiness by sensing potential changes early, making necessary decisions quickly, and reallocating resources fluidly across all functions and levels. Sustainable growth is enabled through innovation, reconfiguration, and talent cultivation. These capabilities are strengthened by purpose-driven leadership and adaptive operating models that capitalize on opportunities to deliver value to customers.

When enterprise agility works, strategy turns into action without friction, teams act with autonomy and alignment, and the organization pivots faster than the market while sustaining growth.

Values of Enterprise Agility

Clear purpose realized through adaptive plans
Guiding with purpose and adjusting along the way ​​outweighs over-planning and the illusion of control.

Shared enterprise outcomes over functional optimization​​
Prioritizing long-term goals and cross-enterprise collaboration outweighs​​ optimizing for short-term, departmental KPIs.

Continuous reinvention over preservation
Boldly challenging established operating models and innovation outweighs structural inertia and preservation of the status quo.

Human centricity amidst change​​
Continuous learning, developing resilience, enabling autonomy, and leading with empathy and trust outweigh leading change by process only.

The Manifesto for Enterprise Agility

From an initiative led by PMI and Agile Alliance, the Manifesto for Enterprise Agility establishes adaptability as the advantage organizations need to reinvent, respond to disruption, and create sustained value amid accelerating change.

Download the Manifesto for Enterprise Agility >

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Additional Agile Glossary Terms

Splitting consists of breaking up one user story into smaller ones, while preserving the property that each user story separately has measurable business value.
An Agile team frequently releases its product into the hands of end users, listening to feedback, whether critical or appreciative.
"Integration" (or "integrating") refers to any efforts still required for a project team to deliver a product suitable for release as a functional whole.
A Milestone Retrospective is a team's detailed analysis of the project's significant events after a set period of time or at the project's end.
A unit test is a short program fragment which exercises some narrow part of the product's source code and checks the results.

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