When implementing agile portfolio management, leaders’ first—and often most daunting—question is: “Where do we start?” I’ve taught my share of frameworks. In some cases, a comprehensive blueprint or roadmap makes sense. They feel safer to people from traditional project/program management – who ARE often the exact people leading the move towards agile ways of working, …
Many organizations tackling cross-product initiatives struggle with initiative ownership. At its heart, a cross-product initiative involves significant impact across multiple products/groups (sometimes called a portfolio) As organizations scale up, they get to the point where they need to tackle cross-product/cross-organization initiatives. These are often significant, complex endeavors aimed at solving an expensive problem or opening …
What gets measured gets managed. But setting OKRs isn’t enough. The flow and traction of OKRs need to be managed as well – otherwise, you’ll find yourself in the OKR swamp. Using an OKR Kanban can help you both see the swamp and improve the flow and traction of OKRs. Here’s an example – Here …
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 …
How can we leverage GenAI to help us build better products? Operate more efficiently? Close more deals? Reduce customer churn? A Company’s GenAI transformation is a classic example of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity – and the need to try things out, inspect, and adapt, by multi-disciplinary teams. In other words, it’s the classic use …
What does Product Oriented Portfolio Leadership Look like? These leaders … Does this look familiar? Honestly, You could come up with this list yourself. All I did was think through what it would look like to apply the Agility Principles for Portfolio Leaders. But I think its a nice example of the power of starting …
You’re actively managing the flow of your most significant investments. You’ve started conversations about how to descale by organizing around products. What’s next? It depends. Where do you want to improve? Outcome orientation? Aligned Autonomy? Sustainable Pace? Predictability? Empiricism? The principles of agility apply at the portfolio level as well. A principle-based assessment can help …
Is your Portfolio Kanban Board Busy? Do you feel like almost any outcome of any significance needs to be managed at the Portfolio level because it involves several of your product/development groups? One solution would be to invest in better portfolio management, coordination mechanisms, etc. A better solution would be to descale. To find ways …
They tell us a story of slow, centralized decision-making, often related to classic program management culture combined with an iron spaghetti portfolio where delivering product outcomes often requires wide collaboration across teams and even teams of teams. An agile, product-oriented portfolio relies mainly on providing strategic guidance and alignment, not managing every Portfolio Kanban board …
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 …