Leaner Portfolio Management - Product-oriented Portfolio Agility

How To Shift from Project to Product at the Portfolio level – A Scrum.org Community Q&A Podcast

A major focus for me these days is helping Leaders who set out to shift their organizations from a project to a product mindset figure out how to scale product orientation to a multi-product environment. They want to apply product thinking to their strategic initiatives that cut across products and beyond the product organization. This …

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How Can We Nudge a Product Team To Be More Flexible?

What do you do when a product team’s capabilities aren’t aligned with strategic priorities? This is a common challenge for product/portfolio leaders. On the one hand – a product-oriented operating model talks about empowered, stable product teams. On the other hand – we want to focus on maximizing outcomes. What if a product is good …

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Pushing The Boundaries of a Product Portfolio

“We have to have this product capability – it’s a key element of this business initiative we already committed to.” The essence of the Product Operating Model is to empower product teams to achieve outcomes without prescribing to them what outputs to deliver. I often encounter organizations who adopt a Product Operating Model as an …

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When and How To Organize Your Agile Release Trains (ARTs)

The idea of bringing dependent teams together to collaborate better and minimize cross-dependency overhead isn’t unique to SAFe. It’s just a fractal of the pattern of an agile cross-functional team, which Agile hasn’t invented either, just leveraged. Here’s how you might go about designing effective ARTs: There will still be dependencies. Sometimes, even a lot. …

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From Blueprints To Trail Maps

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, …

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Cross-Product Initiative Ownership

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 …

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What’s The Right Timing For Portfolio Agility?

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 …

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Product-Oriented Portfolio Leader

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 …

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Next Steps Towards Product Portfolio Agility

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 …

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Descale Your Portfolio By Organizing Around Products

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 …

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