Improving Portfolio Flow Using Flow Metrics

Yes, we can see the current WIP just by looking at the Portfolio Kanban. But we can drive additional insights by explicitly measuring the WIP level, seeing its trend over time, and measuring it both by counting items in each stage of the workflow and by looking at the overall investment size that is in process.

Hopefully the insight is that we really have too many things in process and we should do something about it. And over time, measuring WIP will show whether what we’re doing is successful.

Cycle Time for portfolio-level investments will be measured in months — not weeks, and hopefully not years. It will also have higher variability, since we’re not forcing our portfolio investments to fit a timebox.

Cycle Time gives us key information about our time to learn and time to market. Over time we can hopefully establish a Service Level Expectation that will help us manage our expectations around investment workflow.

Throughput doesn’t care about the size of the investments. It counts investments finished in a unit of time. Remember that in most portfolio workflows, finished means “we’re done treating this as a high profile investment — it’s now back to business as usual.”

With information about the overall throughput we can have some interesting conversations about the funnel leading into the workflow. For example, if we learn that our throughput is three investments a quarter — I know multiple portfolio teams who would love to have that — how many investments does it make sense to consider each quarter? What’s the proper shape of the consideration funnel? Where are our bottlenecks and constraints?

The Work Item Age metric helps us anticipate and intercept investments that aren’t meeting our expectations, by showing us how much time a work item has already been active. Even in the case of portfolio investments with a long time horizon, Work Item Age can help identify anomalies.

Start measuring flow metrics for your Portfolio Kanban as soon as possible, because it will take time to see meaningful data. If you have some historical data, you can try reverse engineering flow metrics to accelerate establishing a baseline. That sort of data can be helpful in convincing portfolio leaders and stakeholders that the portfolio is more like a swamp than a river.

Finally, a warning. It’s essential to focus on flow, and it is the right place to start. But it’s far from enough. Make sure that you’re leveraging flow to improve outcomes.