What is Enterprise Agility?

Posted on November 9, 2007 by Dean Leffingwell in Enterprise Rollout

In my ongoing discussions with companies contemplating agile transformation, I make the point that “Enterprise Software Agility” is indeed different than basic agility as taught and practiced at the team level (different practices, different stakeholders, different impediments, different scope – See Parts II and III of the book). However, for those in the process of conversion, they often want to immediately achieve the substantive benefits that enterprise agility provides. In other words, once convinced that agile can scale for their enterprise, many would like to immediately start implementing the enterprise practices of Part III of my book. Then, of course, I am forced to reveal that there can be no enterprise agility without a significant number of teams having first achieved basic team agility. (As with all things agile, it all starts with the development team.)

Recently, I was challenged with the question as to what is Enterprise Agility, so I posited the following definitions.