Agile Portfolio Management

Typically, a shortage in one of the key resources of the development portfolio causes competition between initiatives (e.g. T2M or experts). It’s not always predictible how market needs develop and since they change even during development, iterative monitoring of the direction is necessary. There are a lot of instances where a new ‘most important matter’ comes up so implementing shorter cycles is needed for being able to follow up on changes. Development processes are not repetitive, therefore collaboration within the organization becomes a must. This is where an effective portfolio management system, that supports an Agile way of working as well, is needed. This will show:

• When, what and with how much certainty the organizaion is able to deliver today – a prioritizing and resource planning structure that is clear and transparent on every decision-making level, preparation mechanisms and portfolio processes that are simple and easy to understand for the organization;
• In what dimensions, where and who has obligations to contribute to the goals – showing divergence, results and learnings along the organizational key dimensions, taking planned actions/reactions from the organization to decision-making forums;
• What is necessary for further development to be launched – showing shortage of resources and skills transparently and developing a supplement-plan;
  
• Where we stand with executing our strategy and key development tasks – Program/Project riporting and monitoring of progress, risk and delivery;
  
• What the colleration is between development/strategy hypothesis and the actual value delivery – following up on value creation, defining decision-making points so if the solution carried out doesn’t serve or support our hypothesis we have the opportunity to intervene before the completion of the entire development.

Obeya room

It takes much effort and attention to deploy a working startegy reporting system with transparent and up to date information, giving ability to act and decide on the right decision level.
A well set Obeya room and the governing modell around it gives a way to follow startegy realization, and formation on operative, program and management level.

Delivery Planning Event

As part of effective Agile Portfolio Management, it’s important to know what skills are needed on which projects, tasks or program, where these skills can be found within the organization, how much resource can be allocated and what teams will work on them exactly.
Delivery Planning Event (DPE) is a big-room-event where every colleague working on initiatives, that make up the portfolio, is brought together to work out what tasks (User Stories) are needed to reach a Value Proposition’s (VP), project’s or initiative’s goals. Each person is responsible for how much of their time can be allocated to each VP.
Building a team
To be able to deliver value to the customer fast and tailored to their needs, you need to have a clear understanding of the purpose of your project and you should have milestones defined before the end that have value of their own. You also need a good team that will keep on delivering throughout the project.
We provide assistance in clarifying your goals (the endgoal AND the small victories in between) based on what your customers need. We will also help putting together a team that contains all the necessary expertise – developers and (if needed) operators as well (DevOps teams).