ACP Corporate key terms

A leadership stance in which the manager's primary job is to remove impediments, build capability, and protect the team's focus, rather than to direct tasks or allocate work personally.

A group that decides for itself how to convert agreed goals into working results, including task breakdown, sequencing, and internal coordination, while remaining accountable for the outcome.

The explicit line between decisions a team may take alone and those requiring escalation, such as budget, contractual commitments, or hiring, so autonomy does not collide with corporate control.

The four preference statements that frame agile work: individuals and interactions, working results, customer collaboration, and responding to change, each valued over its counterpart without discarding that counterpart.

The twelve guiding statements that translate agile values into practice, covering early and continuous delivery, welcome of changing requirements, sustainable pace, technical excellence, and regular reflection.

A recurring cycle in which actual results and working methods are examined at a fixed point and one or more concrete adjustments are agreed, keeping the process responsive rather than plan-bound.

The belief that capability improves through effort, feedback, and deliberate practice, which supports experimentation, honest retrospectives, and tolerance of early imperfect results in a corporate setting.

A shared team climate in which people can raise risks, admit mistakes, and challenge decisions without fear of humiliation or career penalty, enabling early problem detection.

The end-to-end sequence of steps, handoffs, and waiting time required to move a customer request from idea to delivered outcome, used to locate delay and waste rather than to describe org charts.

The smallest releasable increment that lets a real user group achieve a meaningful outcome and generates evidence about whether further investment is justified.

A testable statement about why a defined customer group would adopt a product or change, paired with the evidence that would confirm or refute it before large spend is committed.

A prioritisation method that ranks items by relative value divided by relative effort or duration, so small high-value items surface ahead of large speculative ones.

The economic impact per unit of time of not delivering an item, expressed in money, risk exposure, or forgone revenue, and used to compare items that all look urgent.

A shared, explicit checklist that an increment must satisfy before it counts as complete, covering quality checks, documentation, and approval steps required by the organisation.

A finished, usable slice of product produced within an iteration or delivery cycle that meets the definition of done and could, in principle, be released to users.

A visual analysis placing interested parties by influence and interest, with a note of what each needs, so engagement effort is aimed where it changes decisions rather than spread evenly.

A living record of who must be involved, on what cadence, through which channel, and for which decisions, updated as influence and interest shift during delivery.

The senior executive who funds the work, owns the business case, and holds authority to resolve escalations and remove organisational blockers that the team cannot shift alone.

A visible, self-service display of current progress, quality, and impediments placed where stakeholders pass, reducing status meetings and making reality hard to dispute.

A line chart showing remaining work against time within a cycle, useful for spotting scope growth or stalled progress, but not for forecasting across many cycles.

The facilitator's discipline of managing process, participation, and time without steering content toward a preferred answer, especially when the facilitator also holds a delivery role.

A short, team-authored set of norms on communication, availability, decision-making, and conflict handling that the team can enforce and revise itself.

A team composition pattern where each person has one deep skill plus enough breadth to help elsewhere, reducing bottlenecks and single points of failure in corporate delivery.

A group holding between them all skills needed to take an item from requirement to usable result, so handoffs to other departments are not required for every increment.

A unitless relative size estimate reflecting effort, complexity, and uncertainty together, meaningful only within one team and not convertible into hours or comparable across teams.

A group estimation technique in which participants reveal size cards simultaneously and discuss the widest gaps, surfacing differing assumptions quickly and cheaply.

Sizing work by comparison with previously completed reference items rather than by decomposing into absolute hours, which is faster and more reliable under uncertainty.

The average amount of estimated work a specific team completes per cycle, used for short-range forecasting only, and never as a performance target or cross-team comparison.

Planning in detail only for the near horizon while keeping later work at coarse granularity, revisiting it as evidence arrives so commitments stay honest.

A forecast of which increments reach users in which window, tied to dependencies and decision points, and revised when evidence or capacity changes.

Any obstacle blocking the team's flow that the team cannot remove with its own authority, which must be logged, owned, and escalated with a named resolver.

A scheduled team session that reviews how work was done, identifies root causes of friction, and commits to a small number of tracked improvements with owners.

A structured review of an incident or failure that focuses on system conditions, decision context, and missing safeguards rather than on individual fault, so people report accurately.

The accumulated cost of shortcuts and deferred design work that slows future change, tracked as a visible backlog item so it can be prioritised against features.

The count of items completed per unit of time, a flow measure that reveals capacity and queue effects without relying on size estimates.

The elapsed time from a request being accepted to the result reaching the user, including waiting, and the primary customer-visible measure of responsiveness.

A defined checkpoint where an independent body reviews evidence such as risk, spend, and compliance before further funding or release, ideally fed by delivery artefacts rather than new paperwork.

An approved scope, cost, and schedule reference that may be formally re-baselined at agreed decision points when evidence justifies change, keeping control without freezing learning.

A documented transfer of decision rights, with limits and thresholds, from a governance body to a team or role so routine choices need no committee approval.

The agreed route and time limit for raising a decision or blocker beyond the team, naming who decides, who is informed, and what happens if no answer arrives.