Are traditional portfolio-level processes and behaviors your most significant impediment to agility?
You envision finding an organizational operating system that orients around outcomes, where the right people collaborate closely with each other, where people naturally and easily integrate and experiment, and where there’s a goldilocks mix of alignment, autonomy, and guardrails.
The Promise of Agility at the Portfolio Level
My take on Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) focuses on the following interventions to address the problems of traditional portfolio approaches:
- Strategize – To create focus – Identify the few strategic bets/choices and clarify them using Strategic Themes / OKRs
- Organize – to enable effective collaboration – Reflect on how to effectively organize to make it easy to explore/deliver on these strategies by creating portfolios and development value streams organized around value.
- Operate – Visualize, manage, and accelerate the flow of the most significant strategic initiatives using a Portfolio Kanban.
- Outcome Orientation – Adopt an evidence-informed mindset and operating system where initiatives are aligned around outcomes and measured using results (again, using OKRs) and where investments are measured and efficient – using a continuous discovery mindset.
These principles at the portfolio level allow leaders to explore, understand, and apply a lean/agile mindset at their altitude and decision space, accelerating the cultural transformation needed for true business agility.
An Agile Approach To SAFe’s Portfolio Management
SAFe LPM For People Who Like To Color Outside The Lines
I help portfolio leaders looking to improve their portfolio agility and outcomes through a pragmatic, thoughtful application of SAFe LPM. As the world’s only SAFe Fellow who is also a Professional Scrum Trainer I bring a unique intersection of expertise and perspective that reduces the risk of SAFe/LPM mechanics theater.
Let's discuss how improve our Portfolio Agility
The purpose of this discovery call is to understand your context and goals, explore some options, and see if we are a good fit.
Whether we decide to proceed or not, you’ll probably get some valuable advice for your portfolio journey.
Training Recommendations
Yuval Yeret – Globally Recognized Expert on Scaling w/ Agility
I’m Yuval Yeret. As an agility coach/consultant/trainer, I help leaders pursue real and pragmatic agility at scale. Leaders reach out to me when looking for ways to improve product development as well as when they want to apply agile ideas towards overall operational excellence and business scaling/improvement.
The engagements I thrive in involve taking an agile, pragmatic path to an agile organization. I’m based in Boston. My clients are all over.
Back Story
I spent the first half of my career leading IT and product development – especially in teams focused on operating systems and networks.
While I half-joke that we were practicing DecSecOps in the Israeli Air Force way back in the 90s, my first formal exposure to Agile was in 2006 – when my organization was struggling to get its act together.
I learned about Scrum and Kanban, and we leveraged them to improve our ability to build a quality, valuable product and improve our time to market.
I realized that figuring out how to apply agile techniques to help stabilize and scale product/IT organizations was something I was good at and passionate about – and I essentially pivoted from the field of computer operating systems to human/organizational operating systems.
I’ve had the privilege to collaborate with world-class thought leaders in this space and helped leading technology companies, future and current unicorns, and future-leaning IT organizations improve their ability to innovate, their time to market, and the value they create for their customers.
Thought Leadership
- Establishing Kanban as an alternative/complementary path towards agility at the team and organizational level (some call me “Mr Kanban Israel” due to my involvement in creating a thriving enterprise kanban ecosystem in the Israeli tech sector and for Holy Land Kanban)
- Co-developing Scrum.org’s Professional Scrum with Kanban to help bring Kanban/Flow to more teams and organizations.
- Bringing invitation/pull-based change into the Scaled Agile Framework world.
- Co-creating the icAgile Agile Marketing curriculum and establishing best practices for applying Agile Marketing at scale.
My Current Focus
- Pragmatic Scaling – Leveraging principles and practices from SAFe, Kanban, Nexus, EBM.
- Fixing Agile – helping organizations evolve beyond mechanical or flailing attempts at achieving agility.
- Agile Beyond Software – using agile approaches to design and bring to market physical products (think the latest Gillette razor) or cyber-physical systems combining digital and physical into one experience.
- Agility for Business Challenges – leveraging agile ideas for organizational health/scaling – e.g. through frameworks such as OKRs.
What’s unique about my approach to LPM?
Let me give you my insider take on the SAFe world. Through its trainer certification program (SAFe Practice Consultant – SPC), Scaled Agile helped organizations scale SAFe adoption by making it easier to identify trainers and consultants as well as create an internal cadre of change agents and potential trainers to help drive and sustain the change. That’s all good. However, what happened as an undesired effect is that the industry relies too much on the SAFe certificates, which should be considered just one bare minimum prerequisite for someone to be in a position to guide other people on their SAFe journey. I write more about this here.
That is a long way to say that I believe you should choose a SAFe trainer/consultant based on more than their certification. I AM a SAFe Fellow and SPCT (and also a Scrum.org Professional Scrum Trainer), but much more importantly, I suggest you work with me if you relate to my take on SAFe and the world of agility in general.
Don’t work with me if:
- You are looking to learn/implement SAFe LPM by the book, with much more focus on the WHAT than the WHY.
- You consider it crucial to focus on the SAFe LPM certification exam, much more than actually applying LPM.
- You want to solely focus on SAFe LPM and are not interested in complementary approaches and contrarian views.
In other words – if you like to color within the lines, I’m not sure I’m the one for you…
I bring to LPM my experience in driving evolutionary change, enterprise-level kanban, evidence-based management, and my tendency to create hybrid mashups that explore the boundaries of frameworks. That is why people who are innovators, early adopters and pragmatic proactive tweakers often choose to work with me.
The purpose of this call is to understand your context and goals, explore some options, and see if we are a good fit. You’ll probably get some valuable advice for your portfolio journey whether we decide to proceed or not.