What's The Right Timing For Portfolio Agility?

Most organizations wait too long to adopt portfolio-level agility practices. They have been told, “You can’t scale what’s broken,” so they wait until they nail agility at the team or product group level. But what if fixing what is broken requires focusing on the upstream system that shapes the teams’ work and context?

Back in 2012 or so, I met Riki, an SVP responsible for a 1000-person delivery organization working in traditional waterfall. Critical Chain optimized waterfall, but still waterfall: component teams, heavy coordination, integration costs across multiple products, and a build that took two weeks to integrate.

Riki and her team ran a successful and profitable shop. But to satisfy customers, they often had to accept change out of cycle, which created a constant fire drill. We discussed options, and what resonated was starting with visualizing, understanding, and managing flow at the portfolio level to break the waterfall.

We got it going within weeks. It helped that Riki and the team were experienced, highly motivated, operations-focused leaders. It did not take long for flow times to improve and for “welcome change” to become a more realistic proposition.

Over time, we noticed how much cross-product work this portfolio delivered and started exploring ways to reorganize around value. Eventually they did reorganize to stream-aligned, cross-product groups focused on the real product and used team-level agile practices where they helped.

Starting at the portfolio level gives leaders a lot of leverage. It tackles systemic constraints to product thinking, flow, and empiricism, while letting leaders model the behaviors they expect from everyone else.