Seeing the swamp is the first step in shaping it into a river. You’ve established a Portfolio Kanban – a flow-based view of the significant work taking place in your organization. (also known as your portfolio). More likely than not, there are a lot of cards on that board, like a traffic jam in rush …
A question you’re probably asking yourself as you’re trying to visualize and manage the flow of your most significant initiatives/projects (Aka Portfolio Flow) is – what should the cards represent? What information should they contain? Following SAFe Lean Portfolio Management? your cards will reflect Epics. And you’ll probably use Epic hypothesis statements and Lean Business …
“Don’t tell me to implement this new process.“ “I don’t have time to discuss process.“ Many change agents I work with struggle with engaging senior leaders who don’t have time for dialogues around systems and ways of working. They also don’t appreciate being prescribed a new process. They rarely have time to learn about principles. …
You can’t improve what you can’t see. Improving flow at the portfolio level requires seeing it first. How do you see? A Portfolio-level Kanban is a common way to start seeing. Let’s explore what that looks like Let’s discuss how work flows at this level (Definition of Workflow as described in the Kanban Guide) The …
End-to-end flow of value Continuous Improvement Autonomy and Empowerment Organizing Around Value Sustainable Pace Alignment around Outcome-oriented Goals Energized People Leaders who Serve Speed and Empiricism All worthy Agility Principles (at least I think so…) But why should anyone care? I mean, it’s much healthier to focus on principles than practices as a goal. But …
It seems like we are working on a lot of initiatives. Could it help to get a picture of all the initiatives and where they are in the pipeline? Would it help to make sure we involve the teams and leaders who will need to execute on initiatives in the decision when to actually start …
Let’s be honest. These are “interesting” times for being an agilist. Whether you’re in the “Agile is Dead” camp or not, it is clear that the movement is not well. Agile took over the software development world in a storm. As that happened, the demand for agile outstripped the supply. Agile became practice-focused. A commodity. …
Three members of a PMO are asked what they are doing: Since we’re talking about a Product-oriented Portfolio, it makes sense to treat developing it as a Product Initiative. Making sure we’re focused on outcomes, rather than checkboxes. We might use patterns and frameworks (such as a Kanban Board, OKRs, and Portfolio Reviews), but we …
Are you at the stage where traditional portfolio-level processes and behaviors present the most significant impediment to agility? I see this often. The organization spends six or seven-figure amounts on an agile transformation. Teams and Teams of Teams are working in Agile/Scrum/SAFe. Still, the promised land of outsized value creation and improvement of time to …
Does it make sense to aim for 100% utilization across the organization? Is that efficient? Whether it’s an ad agency, a factory, a product development organization, or any organization – it has a constraint. The constraint/bottleneck should be optimized, but other areas of the process shouldn’t aim for 100% utilization since that would create waste …