Lean Agile Portfolio Management

Achieving strategic goals faster and more agile

70-80% of the projects are still executed in the classic or hybrid way

Retraining an entire organization in agile methods is very often the cornerstone of agile transformation for many companies. Agile frameworks help to scale agile mindsets and methodologies at the company level. However, if we consider an interim balance, we sometimes observe a discrepancy between the originally anticipated goals (faster, more agile, more responsive, customer-centric, etc.) and actual benefits achieved.

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

Although companies like Spotify serve several sales markets (omnichannel), it is and will remain a company with only one product. You can learn a lot from such companies, but unfortunately you can’t transfer all practices from such a company to other organizations due to the unique aspects of their product. As a counter example, we have insurance companies with 200 products and 500-800 applications. A completely different league where a targeted agilization of 20-30% is already optimistic. For the most part, 70-80% of projects are still being executed either classically or via hybrid approaches.

Hybrid project portfolio

Reality has taught us that most project portfolios in most companies are strongly hybrid. The most important finding for today’s PPM is that we should not completely abandon all methods of classic portfolio management – even if this violates some of our modern agile principles. But at the same time, we need to identify those agile practices that are applicable to our hybrid project environment and integrate them in order to make our project portfolio management leaner and more agile.

Lean Agile Portfolio Management (LPM) still has the same core mission no matter what approach is used:

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

Business agility is more than agile execution

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Valkeen Expertise | Lean & Agile PPM

They include the following areas: In order to manage Agile Portfolio Management in a hybrid context quickly, efficiently and on a rolling basis, Valkeen has developed guidelines for a minimum standard that make it possible to plan, approve, control and, above all compare all initiatives uniformly at any time. These include the following areas:

  • Demand management standards

  • Agile prioritization concept (simulation)

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

For more, also read the article from our client (in German)  “Agile project portfolio management – 3 success factors” by Johannes Felchlin (Portfolio Director, Helvetia Insurance) and our case study.