Improving Portfolio Flow Using Flow Metrics

So you have a Portfolio Kanban board managing your biggest investments. You’re actively managing the flow by using this kanban board in your conversations about the portfolio. 

Kanban/Flow Metrics can help sharpen your flow focus even further. The four flow metrics described in the Kanban Guide for Scrum Teams / Kanban Guide are Work in Process (WIP), Cycle Time, Throughput, Work Item Age (WIA). 

How can these metrics help us at the Portfolio level? 

Yes, We can see the current WIP just by looking at the Portfolio Kanban.

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 as well as looking at the overall investment size that is in process.

Hopefully, the insight is - we really have too many things in the 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 (SLE) 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 - in most portfolio workflows finished means “we’re done treating this as a high profile investment - its 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 3 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/constraints? 

The Work Item Age metric helps us anticipate/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. 

Now what? 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. This 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.