Three members of a PMO are asked what they are doing: Since we’re talking about a Product-oriented Portfolio, it makes sense to treat developing it as a Product Initiative. Making sure we’re focused on outcomes, rather than checkboxes. We might use patterns and frameworks (such as a Kanban Board, OKRs, and Portfolio Reviews), but we …
Are you at the stage where traditional portfolio-level processes and behaviors present the most significant impediment to agility? I see this often. The organization spends six or seven-figure amounts on an agile transformation. Teams and Teams of Teams are working in Agile/Scrum/SAFe. Still, the promised land of outsized value creation and improvement of time to …
Do you ever feel like your goals are too inclusive? Being inclusive is essential for culture but not so good for setting goals. You want your goals to mean something. They shouldn’t be an excuse to enable you to continue to spread your attention all over. A question you can ask about your goal/s is …
Can you dance at all parties? Be the expert at the intersection? Sounds like an oxymoron—Jack of all trades, master of none. Beyond the fact that you need to be curious, open-minded, and a lifelong learner, I have a trick for you. You don’t need to be an expert in every snowflake when you’re a …
FlowImpact Yoga is a rising power in the fitness industry. A PE firm has just purchased it, and its leadership is hard at work, making the best of the holding period to grow and improve the business. There are many ideas on the table. The leadership team realized that 1. They need to focus, and …
Projects and initiatives are second-grade citizens in a Product Operating Model world. The organization worked hard to organize around products, creating empowered product teams, each with its product manager/owner focused on a product goal that hopefully aligns with the organization’s larger strategy. At scale, you might have Product Groups and even Product Portfolios, each empowered …
Strategic Themes in SAFe represent strategic choices at the Enterprise/Portfolio level that should guide decisions throughout the portfolio. A qualitative Objective accompanied by a quantitative, valuable, and measurable evidence-oriented Key Result connected to a portfolio KPI is a great way to make sure the strategic theme is pointing toward desired outcomes without going into too …
Here’s a frequently asked question in the SAFe community: What does SAFe say about someone who wants to go faster than two weeks of iteration? I mean, the whole PI concept is based on five iterations of planning. What if a team or organization wants to develop and synchronize faster than two weeks? Is speed going …
A lot of our clients are technology vendors that struggle to use the SAFe Operational Value Streams “out of the box”. Here, I explore how such a B2B vendor should organize around value when building products that are used to support its customer’s business operations. This article was originally posted in the Scaled Agile blog. …
I’ve been asked several times now about Nexus and SAFe — what are the similarities, differences, etc. If you’re not familiar with either Nexus or SAFe I recommend taking a look at the Nexus Guide and the SAFe whitepaper first. Nexus and SAFe — Similar Concepts Let’s start with similarities — There are quite a few of them as you can see: …