Lean Agile Portfolio Management

Implement strategic goals agile and fast

For the most part, 70-80% is still implemented in a classic or agile way

Retraining an entire organization in agile methods is very often one of most important stepstone of the agile transformation for many companies. Agile frameworks help to scale the agile mindset and methodology at the company level. However, if we draw an interim balance, we observe a discrepancy between originally hoped for goals (faster, more agile, more responsive, customer-centric, etc.) and actually achieved benefits.

The reasons for this are usually the same: Agile, scaled methods simply do not fit across an entire organization and all projects. At least for most companies.

Companies like Spotify have or consist of a single product through which several sales markets (omnichannel) are combined, but it is and remains a company with only one product. You can learn a lot from these companies, but unfortunately you can’t transfer all that worked for those companies to other organizations. As a counter-example: Insurance companies with 200 products and 500-800 applications play in a completely different league. If in fact 20-30% can / should be implemented completely agile, then this is already optimistic. For the most part, 70-80% of projects are still being executed either classically or hybrid.

Hybrid portfolio

Reality taught us we are talking about mostly hybrid project portfolios for most companies.

The most important finding for today’s PPM is that we should not completely turn away from some methods and tools of classic portfolio management – even if we violate some agile principles. And we need to identify the agile practices applicable to our hybrid project environment and integrate them into project portfolio management to make it leaner and more agile. Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) still has the same core mission – no matter if agile, classic or hybrid:

Portfolio management is the ability to provide objective assessments of all ongoing and new projects, identifying the most important (prioritization) and feasible (budget & capacity) ones and ensuring their implementation in line of corporate strategy and a balanced portfolio.  (Definition portfolio management, Valkeen)

Business agility is more than agile execution

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Valkeen Expertise | Lean & Agile PPM

In order to manage Agile Portfolio Management in a hybrid context quickly, efficiently and on a rolling basis, we have developed suitable guidelines of a uniform minimum standard that make it possible to plan, release, control and, above all, compare all initiatives uniformly at any time. These include, but are not limited to, the following areas:

    • Demand management standard

  • Agile prioritization concept (simulation)

  • Development of best-practice prioritization factors in a multi-dimensional context (key figures and KPI system)

  • PPM ecosystem consisting of SRO (Strategic Realization Office), Enterprise PMO and Domain PMO’s with coordinated responsibilities and tasks

    • Integration of resource portfolio management (RPM) into the PPM ecosystem (process, methods, tools)

You can also read our client’s article “Agiles Projektportfoliomanagement – 3 Erfolgsfaktoren” von Johannes Felchlin (Portfolio Director, Helvetia Versicherungen) and our Case Study.