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

Test-driven development (TDD) is a style of programming where coding, testing, and design are tightly interwoven. Benefits include reduction in defect rates.
Story mapping consists of ordering user stories along two independent dimensions based on the order activities occur and sophistication of implementation.
Agile teams generally prefer to express estimates in units other than the time-honored "man-hours." Possibly the most widespread unit is "story points."
The product owner is a role on a product development team responsible for managing the product backlog in order to achieve the desired outcome that a product development team seeks to accomplish.
In consultation with the customer or product owner, the team divides up the work to be done into functional increments called "user stories."
Exploratory testing is, more than strictly speaking a "practice," a style or approach to testing software which is often contrasted to "scripted testing."
In software development, an "estimate" is the evaluation of the effort necessary to carry out a given development task; this is most often expressed in terms of duration.

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