Scagilize Network Partner (Trainer & Consultant), Advisor & SAFe Fellow
Whilst working on the first draft of my forthcoming European SAFe Summit presentation “Engaging Leadership with Jargon Free LPM”, I realized that I had missed one of the most fundamental differences between traditional and Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) approaches in my previously published Jargon Free LPM blog series.
It’s quite simple really:
When practising Lean Portfolio Management, you focus on the economic performance of the Portfolio as a whole rather than the administration of the individual projects, programs, products, initiatives or epics that make up the portfolio.
Or presenting this observation in the style of the earlier articles:
It should be noted that these issues are not limited to organizations pursuing waterfall methods and are just as prevalent in organizations adopting agile project management approaches and, dare I say it, many organizations claiming to practice LPM.
LPM addresses these issues by regularly inspecting and adapting the investment profile of the portfolio as part of a Strategic Portfolio Review (SPR). This will happen at least once a quarter (or for those of your well-versed in SAFe at least once a PI). Personally, I prefer to do this at least twice a quarter (or twice a PI) – I’ll cover the reasoning behind this in a future blog.
The SPR should consider all in-flight (both pre- and post- approval) work within the portfolio and balance this against the available capacity, the current budgets, and the future investment plans.
At this event not only will the business cases for any new initiatives seeking approval be considered but the business cases for all post-approval initiatives will be revisited and reviewed against their revised estimates and delivered business value. It is always a good idea to ask the question “Given everything that’s going on, why should investment in this initiative continue, would the money be better invested elsewhere?”.
The attendees will also be involved in the more frequent Portfolio Synchs but these will be shorter and have less breadth than the regular strategic portfolio reviews.
It’s the switch in focus from the fire and forget, individual administration of each project in the portfolio to the regular, cadence-based examination of the full set of investments that is one of the fundamental differences between traditional and lean portfolio management approaches.
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