Are traditional portfolio-level processes and behaviors your most significant impediment to agility?
You envision finding an organizational operating system that is oriented around outcomes, where the right people collaborate closely with each other, where people naturally and easily integrate and experiment, and where there’s a Goldilocks mix of alignment, autonomy, and guardrails.
The Promise of Agility at the Portfolio Level
My take on Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) focuses on the following interventions to address the problems of traditional portfolio approaches:
- Strategize – To create focus – Identify the few strategic bets/choices and clarify them using Strategic Themes / OKRs
- Organize – to enable effective collaboration – Reflect on how to effectively organize to make it easy to explore/deliver on these strategies by creating portfolios and development value streams organized around value.
- Operate – Visualize, manage, and accelerate the flow of the most significant strategic initiatives using a Portfolio Kanban.
- Outcome Orientation – Adopt an evidence-informed mindset and operating system where initiatives are aligned around outcomes and measured using results (again, using OKRs), and where investments are measured and efficient, utilizing a continuous discovery mindset.
These principles at the portfolio level enable leaders to explore, understand, and apply a lean/agile mindset within their specific context, thereby accelerating the cultural transformation necessary for true business agility.
An Agile Approach To SAFe’s Portfolio Management
SAFe LPM For People Who Like To Color Outside The Lines
I help portfolio leaders improve their portfolio agility and outcomes through a pragmatic and thoughtful application of SAFe LPM. As the world’s only SAFe Fellow who is also a Professional Scrum Trainer, I bring a unique intersection of expertise and perspective that reduces the risk of SAFe/LPM mechanics theater.
Let's discuss how to improve our Portfolio Agility
Yuval Yeret – Globally Recognized Expert on Scaling w/ Agility
I’m Yuval Yeret. As an agility coach/consultant/trainer, I help leaders pursue real and pragmatic agility at scale. Leaders reach out to me when looking for ways to improve product development as well as when they want to apply agile ideas towards overall operational excellence and business scaling/improvement.
The engagements I thrive in involve taking an agile, pragmatic path to an agile organization. I’m based in Boston. My clients are all over.
What makes my approach to LPM unique?
Let me share my insider’s take on the SAFe world. Through its Trainer Certification Program (SAFe Practice Consultant – SPC), Scaled Agile helped organizations scale SAFe adoption by making it easier to identify trainers and consultants, as well as create an internal cadre of change agents and potential trainers to drive and sustain the change. That’s all good. However, what happened as an undesired effect is that the industry relies too heavily on SAFe certificates, which should be considered just one bare minimum prerequisite for someone to be in a position to guide others on their SAFe journey. I write more about this here.
That is a long way to say that I believe you should choose a SAFe trainer/consultant based on more than their certification. I AM a SAFe Fellow and SPCT (and also a Scrum.org Professional Scrum Trainer), but more importantly, I suggest you work with me if you share my perspective on SAFe and the world of agility in general.
Don’t work with me if:
- You are looking to learn/implement SAFe LPM by the book, with much more focus on the WHAT than the WHY.
- You consider it crucial to focus on the SAFe LPM certification exam, much more than actually applying LPM.
- You want to focus solely on SAFe LPM and are not interested in complementary approaches or contrarian views.
In other words, if you prefer to color within the lines, I’m not sure I’m the one for you…
I bring to LPM my experience in driving evolutionary change, enterprise-level kanban, evidence-based management, and my tendency to create hybrid mashups that explore the boundaries of frameworks. That is why people who are innovators, early adopters, and pragmatic, proactive tweakers often choose to work with me.