Lean Portfolio Management
“Stop starting and start finishing”
Overview
Lean Portfolio Management is applying lean thinking to managing enterprise, program and product portfolios to provide a fast and flexible flow of high-value work. This approach focuses on delivering the most valuable work first while limiting work-in-process, limiting interruptions and aligning the work to the organization’s intended outcomes and team capacity.
Lean Portfolio Management prioritizes alignment and achievement of business outcomes over focusing on work and deliverables. It is a results-based approach incorporating adaptive planning in quarterly or less increments, high visibility and alignment and inspection and validation of real results.
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Problems We Are Solving
- Lack of alignment of the ‘work’ to the enterprise and portfolio ‘strategy’ and value expected
- Lack of clarity or alignment to business outcomes, focus is on deliverables and ‘output’
- High WIP (work in progress) and multi-tasking across projects
- Upfront funnel allows too many ‘un-qualified’ ideas to get approved
- No visibility into capacity or teams. Individuals matrixed across too many priorities
- Big planning upfront for the entire year with no adaptive planning shorter cycles
Desired Outcomes
- Ideas are qualified and opportunities are evaluated using light weight lean startup and discovery methods
- Portfolio is aligned with Strategic Intent and defines Strategic Themes to guide the outcomes for the year
- Portfolio WIP is limited and aligned with capacity
- Portfolio leaders engage teams in quarterly planning and swarm around outcomes they can achieve within the quarter
- Funding shifts away from project based model to investing in outcomes and budgeting based on program or value stream capacity
Competencies
Strategic Intent & Outcome Alignment
Strategic Intent helps us define and gain clarity on the overall ambitions and north star of our organization. Themes enable focus on the highest value outcomes for the year. Learn More
Quarterly Capacity & Demand Management
Business Outcome Alignment involves breaking down our Strategic Intent and Themes into smaller increments of Outcome Increments that can be achieved within a quarter or less. Learn More
Funding & Governance
Quarterly Capacity & Demand planning is about balancing demand (outcomes and Epics) with available team capacity, planning in quarterly increments (or less), creating a ‘pull’ system and making this process highly visible and collaborative. Learn More
Radars
Agile Release Train Health Radar & Portfolio Health Radar
The AgilityHealth Scaled Agile Framework® assessment radars provide a powerful way to assess the health of your release trains and portfolios by digging deeper into the key dimensions for success and visualizing the results.
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Enterprise Business Agility Radar
The EBA Radar provides a holistic assessment for a portfolio or line of business around the 7 pillars needed to success. One of these pillars being Lean Portfolio Management.
Enterprise Visibility Room (EVR)
Restrainers
- Lack of visibility
- Little understanding of demand vs. capacity
- Lack of clarity, alignment & definition of the Enterprise priority, outcomes, roadmaps & MVPs
- Lack of Portfolio success metrics (available data does not support the goals)
Change Management Solutions
- Enterprise prioritization & incentives
- Enterprise Clarity Center, Portfolio Kanban & enterprise metrics
- Define & understand the current state
- Define the vision for the future state
- Align finance & budgeting to enterprise transformation