Lean Portfolio Management
I help portfolio leaders looking to improve their portfolio outcomes through lean/agile approaches, who are pragmatic, thoughtful, and want a guide who’s an expert on SAFe AND other lean/agile approaches, to help them make the right choices. My SAFe LPM workshops build on the SAFe curriculum and extend it with my expertise and experience, so I’m the #1 choice where agile experts such as Professional Scrum Trainers and Kanban experts learn about SAFe.
Let’s explore the options for starting our LPM journey with a SAFe LPM workshopThe purpose of this 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.
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.
Learn how to implement SAFe Lean Portfolio Management
The SAFe Lean Portfolio Management course enables you to be a key player in implementing LPM. It empowers executives, transformation leaders, and program management officers (PMOs) to leverage these LPM interventions in practice using SAFe.
I help clients kick off their LPM journey by delivering this workshop in-house with a cross-functional group of leaders, including portfolio and transformation leaders, PMOs, and other parties interested in scaling agility to the portfolio level. The workshop includes an optional “Getting Started” workshop to go beyond the curriculum and get going on a blueprint for the actual LPM journey.
LPM Training is just part of the picture
Learn +
Learn + Blueprint +
In this call we’ll aim 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.
What if you want to learn about LPM in a public setting and drive this internally on your own?
Yes, Sometimes it makes more sense to take a public class, maybe with a colleague or two, rather than go all in from the get go. You might have looked for a while, but am struggling to find a solid open enrollment LPM class. I’ll tell you the truth, for a while I’ve been trying to figure out the way to create an open enrollment registration, learning, and getting started experience that delivers the quality and impact of an inhouse engagement.
What I’ve landed on is an immersive LPM master class experience that won’t be for everyone, won’t happen very often, but will attract portfolio leaders who are interested in driving real portfolio agility.
Learn + 3 Months of Yuval’s LPM Community Access
Learn + Community + 3 Months of 1:1 VIP access to Yuval
In this low-pressure call, we’ll aim to understand if the LPM Master Class is a good fit for you.
Training Recommendations
FAQ
Do you use SAFe? Is it important to you to stay close to SAFe guidance? If so then the right choice is to use SAFe materials. An alternative that we can consider is to leverage SAFe LPM workshop materials which are not designed for training but can be used for spot introduction of key concepts as part of an implementation focused engagement. Happy to discuss this path further.
Well, it certainly can be. It really depends on the trainer. Experienced trainers with tons of experiences, case studies, and stories feel comfortable facilitating deeper conversations, coloring outside the lines, and drive a very different classroom experience, even if it is based on the same curriculum. Make sure you check out who your trainer for the class is…
It certainly helps when participants are already exposed to SAFe and ideally have taken a class such as Leading SAFe or SAFe Product Owner/Manager. Having said that, that’s not a strong pre-requisite and I’ve had many students that came in fresh. Sometimes these get it faster than others because they’ve had less exposure to SAFe theater in the past.
The portfolio level can be introduced after agile/SAFe practices are already in place or can be used as a starting point to shape the journey right from the get-go.
If you are using a different approach for scaling (Scrum@Scale, Nexus, LESS, Kanban Flight Levels) it often makes sense to learn a more generalized lean/agile portfolio approach and not worry too much about the SAFe curriculum. This is a common offering I provide to clients – an initial strategic workshop to explore needs and context and figure out a blueprint for the journey. I’m happy to learn about your context and have a deeper conversation about which elements of portfolio you would like to explore and figure out what workshop/training makes sense.
It can be either. The training and blueprint workshops are prime opportunities to leverage an in-person setup to maximize the impact of the experience. The optional getting started immersive workshops might be easier logistically as a remote experience, depending on the context. In any case, the costs are for live virtual. Any travel expenses needed for in-person workshops will be added on top.
Yes, every participant will have access to SAFe LPM certification exam.
From an experience perspective, the classroom / workshop can accommodate up to 25 people. From a cost perspective there’s an extra cost of $1000 to each additional student in the core training offer.
I only take on a limited number of workshops/engagements. This means I’m typically booking 2-3 months ahead, especially for in person workshops. If you have a specific timing in mind, reach out and I’m happy to accommodate if I can or will connect you to someone I trust
Still have more questions?
Let’s discuss
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.
Credentials
What’s unique about my approach to LPM? Why take my class?
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.