What's The Right Timing For Portfolio Agility?

Most organizations wait way too long to adopt some portfolio-level agility practices. 

They’ve been told, “You can’t scale what’s broken,” so they wait until they nail agile at the team and product group level. 

What if fixing what’s broken REQUIRES focusing on the upstream that’s shaping the work and context of these teams?  

Back in 2012 or so, I met an SVP responsible for a 1000-person delivery organization that was working in a traditional waterfall. Critical Chain optimized waterfall. But still. Component Teams. Heavy coordination and integration costs across multiple products. Build that takes 2 weeks to integrate. 

Riki and her team ran a very successful and profitable shop. However, they recognized that in order to satisfy their customers, they often had to accept change out of cycle, which created a constant fire drill. 

We discussed options. What Riki liked was starting with visualizing, understanding, and managing flow at the portfolio level, to break the waterfall. 

We got it going within weeks. (Did I mention Riki and the team were experienced, highly motivated operations-focused leaders? ). It didn’t take long for Flow times to start improving and for “Welcome Change” to be a more reasonable proposition. 

Over time, we’ve noticed how much “cross-product” work this portfolio delivered and started exploring ways to reorganize around value. 

We started introducing more and more agility principles and practices (eventually, they did reorganize to stream-aligned cross-product groups focused on the REAL product and leveraged team-level agile ways of working). 

Here’s the thing - 

Starting at the Portfolio level gives you as a leader, tons of leverage to make an impact on the product-oriented agility of your organization - by tackling the systemic constraints to Product thinking, Flow, and Empiricism and allowing you to learn and model the behaviors you expect from your people. 

Interested in bringing product agility to a multi-product/portfolio context? ​Check out the Portfolio Agility Trail Map​—a free email course based on the lightweight Kanban-first approach described above, combined with modern concepts such as the Product Operating Model and Evidence-based Management.