Essential Strategies for Effective Portfolio Management

Transcription
Speaker 1
(0:17) I appreciate you giving up your lunch hour today, I promise to do my best to make it worth it.(0:22) If you have any trouble hearing me or anything like that, feel free to pipe up, Sherian will be kind of monitoring the chat and so on. (0:30) So if anything, if you have any important questions or comments, feel free to put them in there and we’ll kind of work that way.
(0:37) And we will try to leave some time at the end for questions and discussion as well. (0:42) So welcome to the session today, or as I like to call it, effective portfolio management in a nutshell.(0:48) A quick dissertation, 40 to 45 minutes, obviously nobody’s going to be able to walk out of here and implement portfolio management based on this, but I’m definitely going to try to share some observations, some patterns, some techniques that I found effective implementing it in places.
(1:05) And I say, as Sherian said, there’ll be opportunity to follow up on that if anyone would like to dig in deeper. (1:12) So first a little bit about me, I’ve been kind of in the high-tech product creation space for over 35 years, primarily in medical systems, medical devices, healthcare, healthcare IT, and financial technology. (1:28) Most recently, I’ve had a number of roles in software and systems engineering, process development, quality systems, then product management and program management.
(1:38) So kind of been around the horn on a few different perspectives on this. (1:43) I’ve been an SPC myself for 10 years, a little over 10 years. (1:48) And I do have a particular passion for ways of working and LPM.
(1:53) I kind of felt early in my career that the biggest impediment to really creative product development teams is not the technology. (2:02) It’s not necessarily the work they’re doing. (2:05) It’s the environment, it’s the culture, it’s the way that they’re asked to work and what they’re asked to work on that typically provides the biggest impediment to really unlocking the creativity of high-performing teams.
(2:18) So very early in my career, I made a concerted effort to kind of put some focus in that area and see if we could make that better for people. (2:28) I’m really excited to say I’m a first-time author. (2:30) I’m not going to hawk the book here.
(2:32) You can find it out on Amazon and other places, but that was a very exciting milestone for me. (2:36) It’s been on my bucket list a long time. (2:38) I finally accomplished it.
(2:39) And I’ll also say this year I accomplished another bucket list item of finally getting to all seven continents, finally touching base on Antarctica. (2:48) I heard just a few months ago. (2:51) And this kind of included an ascent to Mount Kilimanjaro.
(2:54) And I will say that was a very life-changing experience for me personally doing that. (2:59) And lastly, I’m a huge nerd, proud of it. (3:03) You’ll probably find me posting more about that than your portfolio management stuff if you find me online, but just something I really enjoy doing and getting into.
(3:13) And there’s my LinkedIn contact if anyone would like to connect after this or ask more questions later. (3:21) So like I say, I’m going to try to offer some practical insights of what I’ve seen. (3:25) We’re going to try to walk the gamut of what portfolio management kind of is and what some of those principles are, some patterns for how we move things through the portfolio in terms of readiness and governance and measuring.
(3:37) I’ll talk a little bit about tooling, not a lot, just give a little bit of advice there more than anything else. (3:43) Like I say, we’ll wrap and have time for questions and comments. (3:46) Sound good?
(3:47) Yeah? (3:48) Thumbs up from everybody? (3:49) Woo-hoo?
(3:50) Yeah, there we go. (3:51) Good to see it. (3:53) All right.
(3:53) So why does this matter? (3:56) Why do we even care about this? (3:58) I think obviously the biggest one we always think of is stewardship kind of in general. (4:03) Are we managing our resources well? (4:04) Are we spending the company’s money wisely?(4:08) Are we bringing in revenue and things like that? (4:11) But for me, it kind of goes a level deeper. (4:13) And I like to push on this because I think in addition to stewardship, we start thinking about sustainable value delivery and employee engagement, those concepts of mastery and autonomy and purpose and really being an agile enterprise, not doing agile, but being an agile enterprise. (4:31) That all starts with what we ask people to do.
(4:36) And what we ask people to do typically starts with the portfolios that we’re managing and how we manage it and how we transition portfolios to the teams to actually do work. (4:48) So people can say that I do Scrum and I do Kanban and I do all of these things that try to make me agile. (4:56) But at the end of the day, if you really want the organization to deliver different results, you’ve got to ask them to do different things.
(5:04) You’ve got to get them working on things that will actually move the needles or they can agile and Kanban and Scrum all they want. (5:13) And I say at the bottom here, you can replace all the plumbing and have a nice shiny new plumbing and ways for people to work. (5:19) But if you’re pouring the same old sludge into it, you’re still going to be disappointed with outcomes out the back end.
(5:24) Right? (5:25) If you want to really move the needles on the business, you’ve got to ask your teams to be doing things that will actually move the needles. (5:32) And I think that’s the heart of what portfolio management is really trying to accomplish.
(5:37) So keeping that as a primary objective in mind, it is that. (5:41) So portfolio management, we define that as a framework of methods and practices that we use to identify and prioritize and coordinate and monitor the endeavors and initiatives sometimes called projects. (5:54) I don’t like the P word anymore, but people relate to it still.
(5:58) And the investments we need to realize them so we can align with our overarching objectives and strategies. (6:04) It’s a pretty fat definition, but just to unpack it a tiny bit, we say framework. (6:11) To me, that means we’re talking about a collection of tools and techniques that have been made to work together. (6:21) It’s not a prescriptive recipe. (6:23) It’s not a rigorous crank turning type of machine. (6:28) It is a blend of science and art, I believe.
(6:31) So you won’t find me talking a lot about prescriptive approaches. (6:38) And I also find, as a fundamental, that our portfolio management systems need to drive concepts of accountability and collaboration, not try to drive conformance or compliance to a process. (6:53) And I’ll talk a little bit more about what some of those mean as we go, but these are kind of two concepts I wanted to get right out in front as we go into the rest of the discussion so people can kind of keep them in mind and think about how they might use and apply to their own situations.
(7:10) So pillars of effective portfolio management. (7:12) When we’re really doing good portfolio management, kind of what does that look like? (7:18) The portfolio management system should be transparent.
(7:22) People should see a single source of truth in terms of what the demand on their capacity is and where they’re currently burning that capacity on initiatives. (7:31) The organization can see it.(7:34) They can see all that potential demand, aspirational and committed timing, understanding the difference between those two, that things that could get in our way, our risks, our impediments, what the status is of things in the portfolio are also visible and are being actively managed. (7:52) There’s no secrets. (7:53) There’s no hidden truths in the portfolio. (7:56) It’s all very transparent.
(7:58) Good portfolio management has a sense of alignment that, you know, teams can clearly see full connection from strategy to execution and execution back to strategy. (8:09) They know what they’re working on. (8:11) Priorities are aligned.
(8:12) They’re visible. (8:13) Dependencies are clear. (8:15) They’re being actively managed.
(8:17) Budgets and funding and allocation are all consistent with those agreed priorities, right?(8:21) You don’t get those impedance mismatches that we’re trying to talk about doing one thing and yet all the structures and systems and budget are pushing us to do something else. (8:32) You know, those things are working in harmony.
(8:34) And the right stakeholders are engaged and bought into what we’re doing. (8:39) They believe in the alignment. (8:40) They believe in the priorities. (8:42) They’re active partners, you know, throughout the process. (8:47) The portfolio is balanced.(8:49) It means that our commitments are properly matching our capacity to demand with our capacity allocation.
(8:54) We’re making commitments based on reality, not just some desire, you know, or aspirational goal. (9:02) We are planning in a balanced way and that our portfolio contains the right mix of work as well. (9:07) That we’re balancing growth and sustaining our products and maintaining our products, you know, keeping our platforms healthy as well as growing, you know, our customers and feature content, you know, to meet the needs of the business and the customer.
(9:24) Our portfolios are responsive, you know, so, and that means really making sure that the information is available so leadership can make, you know, these decisions and these trade off balances when changes happen that affect the business and the market, you know, and other relevant kind of landscapes, right? (9:40) They have the information they need to do that. (9:42) And teams also, you know, feel that when changes of priority happen, that they’re communicated and deployed in an informed and smooth way.
(9:51) That people don’t feel jerked around, you know, that there’s not the priority du jour, right?(9:58) That they know changes happen, change is a good thing, but change is also done in a deliberate, you know, kind of way, not herky-jerky, right? (10:09) And lastly, I think the big one, the big one we always have on our mind is that our portfolio is value-based.
(10:16) That we know that the endeavors and initiatives in the portfolio are focused on objectives and outcomes, not just deliverables and milestones. (10:24) We kind of feel that, I think, in a lot of our organizations, that as much as we want to talk about objectives and outcomes, we still feel pressured in terms of dates and requirements and documents and all that other stuff, right?(10:37) We all feel that.
(10:39) And in essence, the teams really feel like they’re working on things that truly move the needles of the business, you know, kind of going back to what we talked about before. (10:47) So I like this model from Jeff Patton. (10:50) I did include a link here.
(10:51) You guys can check it out. (10:52) It’s really funny. (10:53) If some of you are South Park fans, you’ll especially appreciate, you know, this little video that he did.
(11:00) But it kind of really shows this chain and clearly differentiates the concept of impact, which we want, you know, to keep in mind in terms of our strategy and our roadmap, those bigger things, you know, our focus on actually driving business impact, changes in revenue, changes in profit, changes in market share, you know, things like that. (11:20) But before that, we have to consider what he coined as outcomes. (11:24) And these are the actual changes that our products make.
(11:28) Our products and services create changes in our customers’ behavior, in our business behavior. (11:34) You know, they’re nearer term things, you know, much more readily visible. (11:38) And part of this chain is understanding how the changes we affect in our customers and in our business result in business impacts that, you know, make our business healthier and growing and all those good things.
(11:51) So keeping kind of those two concepts in mind, you know, as part of our portfolio, you know, objectives. (11:59) Yeah. (12:02) So I’ll kind of walk into some patterns here, you know, a kind of a sample flow of portfolio management.
(12:07) I don’t think it will be jarring or controversial to anyone. (12:12) But before we kind of start walking through it a little bit, I want to kind of make the point that, first of all, there is no one size fits all approach to this. (12:20) We will find good patterns that people have curated, you know, things that have worked well in industry, people have good experiences with, but all of those things will have to be tailored to fit our culture, our adjacent business processes, things like that.
(12:36) So that we can all, because all of that stuff influences how and when an organization assesses readiness of its initiatives in flight. (12:46) So all those things will have to be taken into account. (12:50) I personally see, and I prefer a risk model.
(12:53) You’ll see a lot of concepts around risk management, you know, in the way that I talk about portfolio readiness and maturity, because I feel that’s what it actually is. (13:03) And as product managers, product owners, business leaders, moving things through the portfolio is really about finding the sweet spot between getting those high priority items forward into the hands of the teams, getting them delivered to the customers as quickly as possible to realize value and avoiding mortal risk that would significantly derail the teams and disrupt the pipeline. (13:30) And we’re always striking that balance of going forward, but not stepping off the edge of the cliff, right?
(13:37) And so any approach to portfolio management, in my personal opinion, has to be able to right size, how much effort we spend getting items ready, you know, to the impact and the risk of the initiative in question, we have to be able to right size those things. (13:51) There’s no, there’s no, like I say, one, one answer fits everything that goes through our portfolio. (13:58) Yeah.
(14:01) Okay. (14:01) We’ll talk a little bit about that as we go. (14:03) So here’s, here’s kind of the model that I’m going to talk through today.
(14:06) Again, you know, people looking at it are just going to go, oh, yeah, I’ve seen this before.(14:10) I’ll try to try to give a little bit of detail that makes it worthwhile. (14:13) But I find that this model works at multiple levels of the portfolio.
(14:18) Most of us are dealing with multi-level portfolios. (14:20) There’s very big strategic themes and big items, you know, sitting on the roadmap. (14:25) And typically we have multiple product lines, multiple value streams, you know, people are all contributing to different, different aspects of our solution.
(14:33) So they have their own, maybe epics, and then we have features that we’re trying to hand off to the team. (14:39) And I find this type of model, this way of thinking works well with some small nuances and variances, you know, at all of those levels. (14:48) So if you really are looking at this and going, oh, that’s just like the safe portfolio Kanban, or it looks like design thinking, or it’s like customer-driven innovation, it’s because yeah, it is.
(14:59) I mean, all of those concepts are just different ways of expressing and kind of implementing and making tangible, you know, some of the concepts hopefully we’ll talk about here in the next few minutes. (15:08) Yeah. (15:11) So first of all, when we think about intake from a proposal, I think one thing that’s important to realize is that there is typically one and only one entry point to the portfolio.
(15:19) This is, I think, something we face a lot that we don’t want the teams to be getting direction for multiple points of entry, right? (15:27) We don’t want lots of different people trying to tell the teams what their priorities are, trying to tell the organization what its priorities are. (15:34) We need one entry point.
(15:36) Now the caveat that I’ll offer on that is very mature organizations, you know, learn how to tolerate multiple entry points based on impact and risk, you know, understanding if a new thing on the docket, well, this is just a story. (15:48) I can just put in the backlogs and work with the teams, or maybe this is just at the feature level. (15:53) I can bring that into PI planning safely, you know, it doesn’t really affect the roadmap or the portfolio as a whole, you know, being able to make those judgments more mature organizations can do that.
(16:05) But if you’re just kind of starting out with portfolio management, I tend to say it’s better to have one front door and get everything to go through it. (16:13) And then when you get more comfortable with how the organization needs to work, you can think about, you know, partitioning that a little more granularly. (16:22) I like to say that the front door to the portfolio should be a very low entry to barrier.
(16:27) We want to promote innovation. (16:29) We want to promote new ideas, but we don’t want to let, you know, just any old kind of clutter and chaff, you know, in the front door either. (16:37) So typically when you think about proposal, I like to make sure that the proposal side of this focuses really strongly on the customer need.
(16:45) We want to be bringing problems to solve to our organizations. (16:49) We unlock their creativity by giving them problems to solve. (16:53) And we want to always make sure we’re delivering on an actual need, not just responding to somebody’s concept of a solution or something to go build.
(17:01) So I like to say the entry to the portfolio should be a need. (17:04) There should be a background, a context, a real customer need. (17:07) There should be some value proposition associated.
(17:09) We should have idea of what value we’ll actually get from doing this. (17:14) Understanding that the strategic alignment, is this aligned with our strategy? (17:18) Is this aligned with our roadmap?
(17:20) Is this something that’s in our wheelhouse of where we want to go as an organization, our mission, our vision? (17:26) We should know that, you know, right up front. (17:29) Usually admit it, there’s usually an aspirational timeline associated to a lot of the things we’re asked to do.
(17:35) So let’s just get that on the table up front. (17:37) Understand, you know, is there a timeline we need to consider, you know, as part of managing the portfolio? (17:44) And then lastly, you know, it’s often convenient to understand these categories of work.
(17:49) Is it a growth initiative? (17:50) Is it more of sustaining where we are? (17:52) Is it more of maintaining or technological, you know, kind of debt reduction?
(17:57) You know, it’s good to categorize and understand that type of work again, so we can make sure we’re balancing the portfolio from the beginning. (18:04) I personally like to see product management accountable for taking ownership of the intake manifold, you know, looking at these new proposals, you know, routinely and screening them to make sure that they’re not only meeting these things, we’re getting these concepts of need and alignment and value built out very early, you know, in collaboration with our business owners and business partners. (18:29) And lastly, prioritization starts right now, you know, right at the very beginning. (18:34) You need to start prioritizing the portfolio dynamically. (18:37) And I really emphasize that word dynamically, starting right from when something comes in the front door. (18:44) You read a lot of the frameworks, and it seems to imply that prioritization is an event that might happen as part of some quarterly planning cycle or annual planning cycle.
(18:55) I think we should have mechanisms where our portfolio is dynamically reprioritized in real time. (19:00) As things come in, as things move through it, as things change state, continually reprioritize. (19:06) So what do we mean by prioritization?
(19:08) Again, it needs to be a continuous process, not a one-time event, you know, so as things move through and we want to choose a prioritization method, as we say, we want our portfolio to be value-based, so we want to choose a prioritization method that emphasizes the value being delivered. (19:25) And we want a method that promotes objective conversation. (19:28) We want people discussing the factors that go into something being valuable, not where it is in the stack rank. (19:37) I don’t want people arguing about, well, this is a two or this is a three when I’m talking about the things that say, well, what drives the overall value proposition of an item, and then seeing where it comes out in the priority queue as a result of that. (19:53) And we also have to leave room for judgment. (19:55) As we say, this is not an exact science.
(19:58) There will be outliers, unique situations, you know, the pink flamingo that shows up every now and then, and it takes judgment to make this stuff work. (20:13) So I personally like things like cost of delay. (20:17) Those of you who are safe practitioners know all about that.
(20:21) For those of you who don’t, there’s a lot of information out there. (20:26) You know, like I say, it takes a look at value, you know, value of an item from a set of standpoints in terms of the benefit and time criticality. (20:34) Do I enable opportunities?
(20:36) You know, am I managing risk by doing this? (20:39) I like to break out risk and opportunity.(20:41) Having worked in regulated environments, I often find they are different discussions.
(20:46) So safe kind of puts them together. (20:48) I like to break them apart. (20:50) This is a relative ranking method, so this is really good.
(20:53) So things very early in the portfolio cycle usually don’t have a lot of information. (20:58) So you need something that’s robust and allows you to talk about things in lieu of quantitative information a lot of times. (21:05) And being able to do this relative ranking and apply judgment, you know, allows something like cost of delay to be a very effective way to prioritize, you know, throughout the course of the portfolio.
(21:16) It does encourage discussion of the factors driving ranking, and it allows different product and business lines to self-calibrate. (21:24) You want your value streams, you want your product lines to calibrate around these types of techniques, because the conversations will be different based on the environment and aspects of the products being discussed. (21:38) You know, one set of services will not be the same as another set of services in terms of the concepts of value.
(21:44) So you need to allow the teams the latitude to calibrate those conversations. (21:50) And using something like this gets you out of the pitfalls of, you know, prioritization by decibel, whoever screams the loudest, you know, having the hippo come in and prioritize things for you, highest paid person, right? (22:02) And the worst of all, the passive aggressive, we’ll deal with it later, you know, types of conversations, you know.
(22:09) So doing something like cost of delay routinely, you know, periodically, continuously, you know, throughout the portfolio, I think helps make sure that the important things bubble to the top and the less important things bubble to the bottom. (22:26) So before we move on, now we’ve accepted something in the portfolio, we’ve got that problem statement and the value hypothesis and the alignment. (22:34) We do want to make sure that everything in the portfolio has a core ownership.
(22:39) Things, people will have to shepherd, you know, these things through the portfolio process. (22:44) So making sure there’s clear product and business owners, clear technical owners, if you’re going to have portfolio managers and program managers and project managers there to help facilitate the process, make sure those owners are known right up front, as much as you possibly can. (23:00) Because we want to emphasize that at its heart, the portfolio is a pull model, flow is a pull model in the portfolio.
(23:08) It is a Kanban, that’s the way we do want to treat it. (23:11) SAFE calls it that, it is a good model to do it. (23:14) So that means that we don’t just push things forward.
(23:18) We establish that things are ready to move forward. (23:21) And then when capacity is available, and things can be pulled from the top of the priority list, right, that’s why the continuous prioritization is important. (23:31) So we always know what the next thing to pull would be.
(23:35) When capacity is available, we can pull these things forward through the portfolio to the next level of maturity. (23:41) So it is important that we establish and maintain WIP limits, you know, on the whatever portfolio states we choose to adopt, establish and maintain those WIP limits. (23:51) So we’re never forcing product managers and architects and user experience people and so on.
(23:57) We’re not just piling things on their desk for them to do, that they can pick up something, they can drive it to the next level of maturity, and then pick up the next thing. (24:06) So we focus on finishing things and moving things right to the next level, as opposed to just continually, you know, pushing things through the pipeline by brute force. (24:15) Yeah.
(24:18) Okay. (24:19) So the next step, as you would expect to some level of discovery, and we want to make sure we leave room in our portfolio management system for managing uncertainty by having these concepts of planned learning. (24:32) Business agility depends on our ability to learn this as it adapts.
(24:35) We all know that. (24:36) And we’ve been around this a lot. (24:38) I say that disruption happens, though, when we are forced into learning cycles we did not anticipate.
(24:45) You know, and usually this means something went wrong, right? (24:47) Something bad happened, and we’re forced to react to that. (24:51) And in a lot of cases, maybe we couldn’t have foreseen that.
(24:54) But in some cases, maybe we could have. (24:57) I think we want to make sure our portfolio gives us the opportunity to enable smoother flow of value downstream by doing learning on our own terms. (25:05) And that’s what the discovery phase, for lack of a better term, the discovery component of portfolio management is really all about.
(25:13) It’s that period of planned learning that we deliberately undertake to reduce that risk by gaining information ahead of making very significant investments of time and effort. (25:24) This doesn’t mean we don’t do our incremental learning as part of our normal product cycles. (25:29) No, that’s still very important. (25:31) But these are kind of the big things that we want to make sure we have kind of understood, smoothed out, so again, we’re not just walking off the edge of the cliff. (25:38) We’re not kind of being the coyote here, right? (25:42) Jumping on the back of the rocket, getting ready to light the match, you know, until we kind of know there isn’t the wall of the cliff in front of us or the hole that we always fall through or the piano, you know, coming down on our heads.
Speaker 4
(25:55) You guys have all seen.
Speaker 1
(25:57) Yeah, yeah. (25:57) Go ahead.
Speaker 4
(25:58) Question from Bob. (26:00) What have you seen as a good way to set a WIP limit for portfolio, at least initially?
Speaker 1
(26:07) So I think typically you can just kind of look at, I kind of tend to start with looking at things like bandwidth. (26:13) I mean, when I did this in a previous world, you know, we just kind of realized that practically speaking, we think about multitasking and task shifting, really a product manager probably couldn’t be responsible for one or two things, you know, moving one or two things forward at any given time. (26:32) Maybe they could consult on a couple of others, you know, being able to offer insights and so on, but saying, okay, you know, just setting some of them to be, you know, a little bit arbitrary saying, well, product man, if we got product managers involved, we, an active initiative can’t, can’t overload that product management team.
(26:51) They can’t have more than one or two on their plate, you know, at a time. (26:54) So if, if somebody’s hands are full, something has to wait. (26:57) The architects were often very, very similar, you know, two or three things kind of coming at them at a time would be more than they could really effectively move through.
(27:10) Right. (27:10) And you kind of do the same thing for the other critical skill sets that are part of this whole process. (27:15) And I say, user experience was another one, you know, doing your human factors and, you know, that type of thing.
(27:22) You know, you gotta, just gotta look at those critical skill sets and, you know, you start with something and you see how it works. (27:28) And then part of your inspect and adapt is go back and say, well, did we have people doing too much or did we have people doing too little? (27:35) Could people have done a little bit more?
(27:36) Oh, no, we gave them too much and just adjust them, you know, kind of as you go and make sure there’s a safe space where people can put their hand up and say, I can’t do all that.(27:48) And this too. (27:50) Right.
(27:50) People are the best judge of what they actually can handle at the end of the day. (27:55) I say one size does not fit all and just have a system where you can be sensitive and open to people putting their hand out and saying, I can’t do a good job with this if you put another thing on my plate. (28:09) Yeah.
(28:10) Good. (28:12) Cool. (28:14) So the thing about discovery, you know, people always get worried, is this just a lot of big upfront work that’s going to slow everything down and it’s going to be analysis, paralysis and it’s going to be the quicksand and we’re always going to get bogged down.
(28:27) Yes, that’s always a problem. (28:28) There’s always a potential problem. (28:30) Yes, that can happen.
(28:31) So it’s really important to balance this notion of. (28:36) Am I being deliberate about my learning from is there any reason I can’t keep moving forward? (28:41) Right.
(28:41) You always got to strike that balance. (28:43) So we want to make sure we’re doing just enough discovery to clarify our problem and our outcomes, understand the dependencies and enable sizing. (28:52) Make sure we’ve got a good first step for a solution.
(28:55) I’ve got a viable solution concept that I can move forward with, and I think I got my arms around those foreseeable risks and what additional learnings I might have to do. (29:06) So it’s literally a just enough, do I have just enough to make sure I’m on good footing to take my next step? (29:14) That’s really what this is about.
(29:16) So really establishing a clear definition of ready. (29:19) I’ve worked with teams where we’ve established rubrics for these things, you know, sets of questions and they want to make sure, can I answer these questions effectively? (29:27) You know, not having mounds of documentation, but could I stand in front of a whiteboard in front of the team and quickly, you know, give the answers to some of these critical questions to the point where the team would go, okay, I understand, I got it, you know, and be able to go forward.
(29:43) And we want the discovery to be holistic. (29:46) We want to think about all of the factors of success that are necessary to have a successful product and that can deliver on those outcomes. (29:54) We want to think about it from the customer’s perspective.
(29:57) We want to think about it from the business’s perspective. (29:59) Can the business be ready for features to be released to the customer? (30:04) Support, training, business processes.
(30:08) Technically, are we ready? (30:10) You know, do I understand the factors associated with my platform health? (30:14) Do I have to upgrade my platform?
(30:15) Do I have to grow the scalability? (30:17) Do I have to enhance my architecture? (30:20) Are there additional privacy and securities concerns?
(30:22) So, think very holistically about these considerations as part of your discovery to make sure that there’s no giant potholes, you know, waiting for you out there. (30:32) And again, this is a very collaborative exercise. (30:35) And it’s very tempting to say, well, I don’t want to bother the teams while they’re working.
(30:40) You’re not bothering them. (30:42) You’re setting them up for success. (30:44) If a team’s going to be involved in it, if they’ve been in the discovery, they’re already getting, they’re already doing the learning.
(30:51) They’re coming up the curve. (30:52) They’re going to be ready for it when it comes. (30:55) So, don’t be afraid to broadly engage teams and stakeholders to really bottom out these big questions before jumping forward into it.
(31:05) As I said, I just cannot emphasize it enough. (31:07) You know, too many times people say, I just don’t want to bother people. (31:10) I know they’re busy.
(31:11) I can think about this myself. (31:13) I can figure this out. (31:14) No.
(31:15) More eyes, the better as far as I’m concerned when it comes to discovery. (31:21) Planning.(31:23) We’re starting to get all familiar with this part now.
(31:25) You think about things like PI planning and other planning paradigms that we see in the frameworks, you know, really planning is about teeing up that next increment. (31:34) I love this quote from Eisenhower because I think it really captures the spirit perfectly. (31:40) In preparing for battle, I’ve always found that plans are useless, but the act of planning is indispensable because planning is an activity.
(31:48) It’s collaborative. (31:49) You’re getting people together. (31:50) They’re aligning.
(31:51) They’re defining what these meaningful units of value are. (31:55) What are the value hypotheses? (31:56) Who cares about this feature?
(31:58) Why do they care about this feature? (32:00) Is it worth doing this feature? (32:03) Getting those things broken down into the backlogs.
(32:06) You know, so you’re starting to get the teams, you know, putting the things out there the teams need to care about. (32:12) You know, you’re capturing those dependencies and the priorities, getting alignment across those teams. (32:17) Sizing the packages.
(32:18) Can we actually deliver these packages of work in the quarter, in the sprint? (32:23) You know, whatever it takes. (32:25) And then making sure that we are all on the same page with given our capacity and our priorities that things can actually be delivered, you know, in the planning time frame.
(32:36) And to say that, you know, we think about PI planning, the sprint plan is not the output of PI planning that we should all care about, as an example. (32:44) The objectives are the output that we all care about, getting that alignment and having everybody’s eyes really focused on what we’re trying to accomplish, not that framework sprint plan that we came up with in a few hours, that’s going to change as soon as you do the first sprint planning, right? (33:02) So we say the plan is the output of all this collaborative activity that involved the stakeholders needed to achieve success.
(33:09) So we want to, this is the process of transforming aspiration into commitment. (33:14) It’s making sure we have the information that we can lay down a solid commitment, you know, to the business. (33:20) And like we say, it’s holistic.
(33:21) It covers everything we need to achieve quality and deliver on the intended objectives and outcomes of what we’re planning. (33:30) The last kind of real point here on the planning is we want to make sure that’s a value breakdown and not a work breakdown structure. (33:36) So we’re really concentrating on breaking things down by what outcomes and objectives we’re achieving and making sure those roll up to deliver, you know, on the higher level of business objectives and impact, not thinking about tasks and items of work.
(33:51) And what I kind of mean by that, when I talk about value breakdown and think about these classic planning items, I got my strategy and that I typically have strategic objectives. (34:01) And then I got my roadmap epics, you know, like that sitting in my portfolio. (34:05) Those typically relate to more specific business objectives.
(34:10) And then I deliver features via releases that deliver on these outcomes. (34:16) We talked about we’re making some tangible change in our customer, in our business way of working and whatever, you know, the feature is intending to impact. (34:27) And then of course, we have stories that the teams are doing much more frequently and they have a so that proposition, right?
(34:32) Those are all expressions of value. (34:35) And we typically see these top level things, you know, that we consider to be part of our our portfolio. (34:40) We use OKRs.
(34:41) OKRs are a fantastic mechanism for making sure that all of these outcomes and objectives and so on roll up and support each other, you know, all along the way and talk a little bit later about, again, how to use OKRs to really make sure we’re doing that. (34:57) But OKRs are a fantastic tool for doing this. (35:00) I definitely, definitely emphasize making OKRs done right, an important part of your portfolio management structure.
(35:07) And we’ll talk at the end, but, you know, scaled OKRs, which is another another part of hyperdrive here, does have some really great material on this. (35:17) The model they have fits this model, you know, very, very well. (35:21) And so people that are really interested more about how using OKRs to support their portfolio management, I definitely would endorse, you know, having a look at that material.
(35:32) Development and delivery, you know, again, another part that we get increasingly familiar with, because at some point we have to produce something right. (35:39) But from a portfolio perspective, we just want to make sure that as outputs are created, deployed and released, that one, we are focused on enabling outcomes and objectives, not just deliverables. (35:51) But we want to make sure that we’re building up the analytics, you know, our capability to do analytics from what we’re doing, that we’re looking at fitness to purpose, but we’re getting that instrumentation in place.
(36:03) We’re getting the dashboards and radiators we need in place, you know, so that we can actually look at these things post-release and make sure we’re done what we actually said we were going to do. (36:15) This is often an afterthought of development and delivery. (36:20) And how many organizations have said, well, after some releases happen, well, not all we need a dashboard to do this.
(36:27) Now shift that stuff left, because this is what the portfolio cares about in terms of development and delivery. (36:33) Are we actually delivering on what we said we were going to deliver on from an objectives and outcomes perspective? (36:40) We want to make sure we’re enabling, these are all learning mechanisms, right?
(36:44) That’s what these are. (36:45) You know, we want to be able to mine the data. (36:47) We want to be able to see performance, you know, in as real time as we can, so that we can test our hypotheses and use that data to then do the pivot or progress decisions, you know, that are a big part of managing the portfolio going forward, that affect the next round of what goes through the portfolio.
(37:07) So these learning mechanisms, getting these things in place are a huge part of development, delivery and real portfolio management. (37:15) Make sure it’s got its eye on that as part of the process. (37:20) Takes us directly into monitoring and measuring.
(37:22) When things get out there, you know, data is what drives this whole process at the end of the day. (37:28) So we want our product performance to make sure it’s informing these decisions about how we’re going to evolve the product going forward. (37:36) So our portfolio management structures have to make sure we never lose focus on whether these outcomes we hypothesized about are coming to fruition, that these outcomes are translating into impact, you know, going back to that patent model, that all of this is rolling up and satisfying our big strategic and business objectives.
(37:55) So a working business and product intelligence system is essential to really managing the portfolio in a data-driven, objective, you know, way that focuses on delivering value to the business and the customer. (38:09) So if you’re trying to do portfolio management without good business or product intelligence, you’re probably going to find yourself struggling, you know, because the data just won’t be there. (38:21) You need to make the decisions that need to be made along the way.
(38:27) But it’s not just about the products. (38:28) It’s about the process itself. (38:31) So not only is the portfolio, but that also needs to be transparent and visible.
(38:35) We need to be able to measure the process. (38:38) Is our portfolio process operating effectively and efficiently as well? (38:43) You know, giving us the data we need to do the governance we have to do.\ (38:48) I’ll talk about governance next, which is all about facilitating the flow from inception to realization. (38:54) And it’s all about driving continuous improvement.
(38:57) The data is essential.
(38:59) So we have to measure our portfolio management process well. (39:02) And usually there’s kind of two chunks of data. (39:06) These are examples.
(39:08) Have a look at these. (39:10) What metrics and data you choose to look at the portfolio, look at the execution, you know, underneath it will totally depend on what you’re trying to accomplish in your organization. (39:23) Choose the ones that matter the most.
(39:25) Don’t choose 20 and try to monitor them. (39:28) Pick the five or six that really matter and focus on them. (39:32) Because if you get really good at those five or six, you can pick another five or six, you know, later to help continue to drive the behaviors and attitudes that you feel make your portfolio management system work.
(39:46) So radiating the roadmap, being clear about what’s aspirational and committed. (39:51) Again, keeping an eye on those OKRs, making sure that they’re very visible and understandable and are working. (40:00) Initiative maturity.
(40:01) How ready are things by state? (40:02) I’m walking into PI planning. (40:04) Are the things I want to take into PI planning ready for PI planning?
(40:09) Being able to look at that objectively. (40:11) Capacity allocation burn. (40:13) Predictability cycle times.
(40:15) Radiating my risks and impediments. (40:17) Where are they? (40:18) Roaming them.
(40:19) You know, what’s my roaming quadrant map look like for my risks and impediments?(40:24) And then the execution metrics that you guys are from, things like predictability, flux, how much of my work is tracing to the roadmap and my planning goals. (40:33) Cycle times.
(40:34) Work in progress. (40:35) All things that are good, good pools of data to consider in terms of managing and making sure my process is working right. (40:44) Because the data drives the governance.
(40:47) Because at the end of the day, and this is, love this one, because the most effective portfolio management systems do rely on leadership to drive the process.
(40:56) You want your business leaders, your product management leaders, your C-suite, they should be the ones that have the real accountability and ownership for things moving through the process. (41:08) Portfolio managers are great to facilitate the process.
(41:12) So they want to make sure that the data is available and consumable by the leadership.(41:17) The leadership needs the data. (41:20) They can raise potential issues with the data integrity and accuracy, getting the leadership to come back and help make the data more correct.
(41:27) They can facilitate the forums that we use to manage the portfolio and the collaboration and that the risks are getting handled. (41:35) But we don’t want our portfolio managers to become police officers or secretaries or data entry clerks or note takers. (41:43) They are not accountable for the information in the portfolio.
(41:48) They’re responsible to help make sure that that data is accurate and available to leadership to make the decisions. (41:54) So we want our business owners and product managers and technical leaders and so on to be responsible for keeping this data correct and current, moving these things through this portfolio cycle and monitoring the overall performance of what’s going on there. (42:10) We want them to feel accountable and owning that process.
(42:16) So again, if you’ve got a portfolio management system that’s relying on portfolio managers to make it work, instead of holding leaders accountable for the health and flow of the portfolio, again, you’re probably going to find you’re going to get those impedance mismatches, those friction points building up in terms of getting the right things to happen at the right time. (42:38) There are forums we recommend. (42:40) There’s a ton of things out there in terms of meetings and meeting types and ways, but I typically find a simple structure really works best.
(42:50) Something that’s predictable, something that’s on cadence, just like sprints are on cadence, getting your portfolio kind of activities on cadence as well. (43:00) We all know about things like inspect and adapt and PI planning and other big planning activities that kind of occur right at the head of a quarter. (43:09) But make sure that throughout the quarter, you’re meeting frequently about the portfolio.
(43:14) You’re looking at what things are in what states, what are the obstacles to things being ready to move forward? (43:21) Do we have the right collaboration going on? (43:24) Are we reprioritizing dynamically to keep the top of the queue fresh?
(43:30) Usually having a larger quarterly business review in the middle of the quarter to take a look at more holistically across different product lines and solution lines and value streams and to make sure that the priorities are clear, that the objectives and outcomes are rolling up the way they should. (43:47) So having some of these very standard meetings that are very, very focused on the health and status of the portfolio and what people need to be doing to keep moving it forward, to get it ready for the next kind of business event that depends on this portfolio data.(44:05) Getting these forums kind of in place, they’re immutable, they happen, they happen predictably on cadence.
(44:12) I think it’s extremely important to keep in mind.
Speaker 4
(44:16) Questions in the chat, Jeff, if we want to take a pause.
Speaker 1
(44:18) Go right ahead.
Speaker 4
(44:19) So Ram is asking, are you saying portfolio managers are not accountable, but leaders are?(44:24) Can you clarify?
Speaker 1
(44:26) I’m sorry, what kind of managers? (44:27) I didn’t quite get that one.
Speaker 4
(44:28) Portfolio managers are not accountable, but leaders are.
Speaker 1
(44:32) Yes, I will say I do prefer to see the leadership being held accountable and owning what’s going on in the portfolio. (44:41) Because they’re the ones responsible for delivering on the business goals, the business objectives, and the items in the portfolio are how we do that. (44:49) So I do like to see C-suite looking at those leaders, and I’m avoiding saying things like vice presidents and directors and so on.
(44:59) Because we know in a lot of these structures that our value stream leadership is not necessarily one-to-one identical with our hierarchical functional organizational structure. (45:11) So the leaders of a value stream, the leaders of a product line, or parts of a portfolio typically would be kind of a matrix view of our hierarchical organization. (45:23) So yes, I like to see the value stream, for example, leadership held accountable for what’s going on in their portfolio, the health of their portfolio, and the accuracy of their portfolio data.
(45:34) Yes.
Speaker 4
(45:37) And it sounds like we have a couple of comments on this sounds a lot like a delivery coordination over a product portfolio management. (45:44) Can you give us your insights?
Speaker 1
(45:47) Yeah, I’m not sure they’re entirely separate, right? (45:50) Because, I mean, the portfolio management is really about this engine of we want to deliver on these outcomes and objectives, which means we have to make sure that people and teams and value streams are working on the right initiatives, endeavors that will make that happen. (46:10) So there is an aspect of making sure we are delivering the right things, because delivering the right things is how we actually enable those outcomes and objectives to be realized in terms of value.
(46:23) So I do think there is a relationship there. (46:27) I don’t think necessarily we want to conflate one with the other necessarily, but I think there’s definitely a relationship. (46:40) Good questions.
(46:41) Like them a lot. (46:43) So quick note on tooling. (46:47) We’ve all seen it.
(46:48) You know, we want to do portfolio management. (46:50) Somebody says, yeah, we should go buy a tool. (46:52) Let’s go do that.
(46:54) I’m just going to say, I guarantee you, buying a tool will not solve your portfolio management problems and needs. (47:05) Granted, if you want to really do portfolio management at the enterprise level, coordinating all this information, radiating the information properly so that leadership and other people have visible to it is important. (47:19) It will be difficult to do this at the enterprise level in spreadsheets and on stickies on the wall and all of that for long periods of time.
(47:29) PowerPoint and Google Slides only can take us so far, but I think you do have to know how you want your portfolio management to work before you can go invest in a tool. (47:42) You do have to have some experience with making your portfolio management work, even if the (47:47) infrastructure is a little bit challenging, a little bit manual, a little bit clunky at (47:53) first, but understanding how you really want to do it so you know what aspects of it are (47:58) important, what data is important, what reporting is important is really necessary before you (48:05) can go out and properly select the tool.
(48:08) Because when you select the tool, it has to be done with the intent that you are going to use it. (48:15) You’re going to use it all the time. (48:16) You’re going to use the information in it live in as many forums and use cases as you possibly can.
(48:24) That you won’t have, for example, some project manager making a PowerPoint slide based on what some tool that only they have on their desktop reports in terms of data. (48:36) That will not work long term. (48:40) Let’s say this point right here.
(48:42) If the organization is not using the portfolio management system itself, the portfolio management system will not be useful. (48:51) I’m going to point that out again. (48:53) If it’s not used, it won’t be useful.
(48:56) You will have wasted your money on the tool. (48:58) You will need a tool that can be this radiator for the organization lifetime. (49:07) Before you select the tool, make sure you know your process, what your portfolio management process you want to look like, what your process objectives are.
(49:15) How are you going to measure the effectiveness of your portfolio management system?(49:20) What use cases are most critical to your organization? (49:23) Again, one size does not fit all.
(49:25) Make sure you know what’s most important to you. (49:28) Then how the information in that system needs to flow across your entire ecosystem. (49:33) What reports do you need?
(49:34) What dashboards do you need? (49:36) What entry forms do you need? (49:39) So people can keep the data up to date and verify that that data is useful and use that data in decision-making scenarios.
(49:47) Select your tool with that in mind, and you’ll be much, much happier with your investment.(49:52) I guarantee it. (49:54) So quickly, in summary, we say a good portfolio management process is founded in transparency and visibility, first and foremost.
(50:02) It’s all about the information. (50:04) It’s all about driving collaboration, driving decision-making, and making sure that we are driving and realizing value by identifying and realizing these outcomes and objectives. (50:15) That’s the heart.
(50:16) If you can kind of keep those things in mind, you’re going to be successful. (50:21) I can pretty much guarantee it. (50:22) We want to say portfolio management depends on this leadership, taking ownership and accountable to the status and the health of the portfolio.
(50:32) If a portfolio initiative is going south, you don’t point at the portfolio manager and blame them. (50:41) The leadership needs to come together and say, what do we need to do differently to make this successful? (50:47) So a portfolio manager is there to enable and facilitate and support that process and make sure that this data is in good shape and leadership has access to it and help facilitate those decisions and resolve impediments and risks.
(51:03) But ultimately, the health and status of the portfolio and the readiness of the things in it fall on the shoulders of the leadership. (51:11) Let me say that data on both the product and the process performance is absolutely critical to making a portfolio management system deliver.(51:21) Product performance in the field, how the process itself is working, and are both delivering to meet your business needs.
(51:31) To learn more, this will be included, I think, in the deck. (51:34) I think Shirin will make the deck available. (51:35) Like she mentioned before, this IC Agile, the principles of lean portfolio management, there’s a really nice white paper out there, and I think it leads into the training class that Shirin talked about.
(51:49) Whether you are a safe person or not, scaled, I’ll fix that before I send out the deck. (51:56) I do like what the Scaled Agile Framework has to say about lean portfolio management and some of the techniques around that. (52:02) You’ll see a lot of them in the talk that I just gave.
(52:06) I do think there are good principles in there, whether you want to follow safe or not. (52:09) The Scaled OKR stuff, I like a lot in terms of really tracking objectives and outcomes and so on.(52:16) Then some books that I’m sure you guys have seen and heard of these books before, but I really like them because I think a lot of the principles that underlie good, effective portfolio management can be found in a lot of these books going forward.
(52:29) I would definitely suggest these are good reading material if you haven’t read them already. (52:36) With that, Shirin, do you want to talk about the class again?
Speaker 4
(52:42) Please sign up. (52:46) Again, use the code CELEBRATE in order to save $100 off. (52:50) Our first session is going to be July 11th and 12th, but we’re offering the classes monthly if you can’t make it to our device session.
Speaker 1
(53:01) With that, we’ve consumed a chunk of the hour, but more than happy to stick around for a few minutes. (53:07) People have questions or comments or insights or observations they’d like to share from their own experience, certainly glad to do that, but thank you for your time. (53:17) I hope this has been useful in some way or another, and again, very happy to have people reach out afterwards as well.
(53:26) There we are.
Speaker 4
(53:29) Looks like Eric has a question for you, Jeff.
Speaker 5
(53:33) Yeah, thank you very much. (53:34) That was a really good presentation. (53:36) I’m looking forward to signing up for a course.
(53:39) The question is around, once you teach a course and everything, is that like a certification that’s granted to you at that point in time, or is that like a separate thing that has to be done through another organization?
Speaker 1
(53:51) If you can just give a little bit of- My understanding, Shirin, is the IC Agile stuff, they do offer certifications as part of their curricula.
Speaker 4
(54:01) Correct. (54:02) Are you referring to the IC Agile class, Eric?
Speaker 5 (54:04) Yes, the LPM class that’s offered through Hyperdrive. (54:07) Once you do that, do you automatically get a certification? (54:11) Do you have to take an exam or something that has to be scheduled at a later time?
Speaker 4
(54:14) No, no exam. (54:15) As soon as you complete the training, you’ll get an email with directions on how to claim your certificate, so no worries about exam.
Speaker 3
(54:23) Thank you. (54:24) Thank you. (54:25) This is Ram.
(54:27) Jeff, thank you for the presentation. (54:30) My question is, apart from having a portfolio Kanban and VizGIF, which is for managing your portfolio, what are the top five things which has worked for you to enable? (54:40) Because I’m of some belief that no tool is going to help you better manage portfolio if your portfolio processes are not in place.
(54:48) So what are the top five things that you feel have worked for you to enable portfolio management?
Speaker 1
(54:54) Yeah. (54:55) So I think a lot of them are in here, but when I’ve typically done this, the first thing is just, first of all, finding a way to make sure the portfolio is visible and manageable. (55:06) Whether you buy a tool or not, there has to be some way to get the information organized.
(55:12) Getting people to understand these notions of maturity and agree on concepts of readiness when things are ready to move forward, also very critical. (55:23) But again, there’s always the group of people that try to push things forward as fast as humanly possible and dump stuff on the team that the teams aren’t ready to do. (55:32) And then they get all upset when things are delayed and problems happen and the deliveries interrupted.
(55:40) But there’s also the other side that there’s people that don’t want to take a step forward unless every single last possible question is resolved, right? (55:48) So getting people to kind of find those sweet spots early so stuff flows. (55:54) Getting these collaboration forums in place where leadership is looking at the portfolio, they’re being asked to get on these portfolio items to help manage the progression, resolve the questions, get things ready.
(56:12) Those are the top three. (56:13) I’m going to just stop with top three. (56:15) If you can get the portfolio visible, get people to agree on these concepts of readiness, get these forums in place where you can start to have these active conversations, bring up issues, bring up problems, start getting the pulse going.
(56:31) I like to draw the analogy that if I think about a quarter, at the beginning of every quarter, I start squeezing the toothpaste tube from the bottom to get the good stuff out the top in time for the next kind of quarterly planning cycle, right? (56:45) So using these meetings to think about what do we need to do to keep squeezing the stuff up out of the tube and make sure we’re squeezing the high-priority stuff up out of the tube as well.
Speaker 3
(56:56) One last question related to that is with this strategy in place, did you have a challenge that this strategy works only with product-based or value stream-based funding or does it work even with project-based funding?
Speaker 1
(57:12) I love that question. (57:14) Project-based funding will always be a little more challenging, right? (57:17) Because there’s kind of that additional funding gate that you always have to go through.
(57:22) So you’ll always find that people will want to introduce this notion of elaborate business cases, big upfront design requirements, things like that, these kind of gating items. (57:36) You can deal with that in the process, but it does create, it does interrupt the flow when these gates have to kind of sit and wait. (57:47) I don’t mind, I mind less seeing gates at this level of the process.
(57:53) I don’t ever want to see things like gates affecting the development, the actual development and delivery of what’s going on. (58:01) So if you’re going to have to have gates, you’re better off having them here at the portfolio level than having them at the lower level where you’re really interrupting the flow of the teams. (58:12) So with that, I would definitely say this works better when you’re in a model where you’re funding the value streams or you’ve got those budgetary guardrails in place, you’re funding the value streams, you’re giving them some autonomy to manage the portfolio and how they burn the budget that’s been allocated to them.
(58:29) But this can work with project-based funding as well. (58:34) I just argue probably not as well.
Speaker 3
(58:37) Right, right. (58:38) But I think what you hit on which is very important is that the gates are at the portfolio level, which limits the confusion of the bottlenecks at the lower levels. (58:46) Right.
(58:47) Thank you. (58:48) Thank you.
Speaker 2
(58:57) So I would say I’ve had experience with Jira Advanced Roadmaps, also called JAR. (59:08) So if you’re looking for a tool, my experience is that’s a great tool. (59:13) I’ve used it for roadmaps, it’s Gantt charts, and you can basically scale it all the way up.
(59:27) And it’s a great thing to use also when you’re going into PI planning, and it provides transparency. (59:33) And if everybody is updating Jira, then it’s as accurate as people doing that.(59:39) So I have not seen a better tool than that in terms of if you were like a portfolio manager, where you’re trying to see in real time how things are going.
(59:50) Now, if people are not updating Jira, then it’s useless. (59:54) Right.
Speaker 1
(59:54) Yeah, and that’s a great point, Dave. (59:57) And I’m so glad you said that because you didn’t talk a little bit about that. (1:00:00) But this notion that your tool needs to integrate with the rest of your ecosystem.
(1:00:06) So you’re right. (1:00:06) There’s as little manual update at the portfolio level as possible.(1:00:12) But natural data collection from other parts of your ecosystem work together to keep your portfolio information current in real time.
(1:00:21) So the less manual conditioning and coercion, we’ve done that, right? (1:00:26) The manual coercion of data. (1:00:27) The less we have to do that as part of our portfolio management, the better off we are.
(1:00:32) Absolutely.
Speaker 2
(1:00:32) Another great tool that I’ve seen is Actionable Agile. (1:00:37) It gives you way more details and options in terms of metrics, which I’ll bring back to the team. (1:00:48) It’s got Monte Carlo, CFD, scatter plots, way, way more detail than what you’re going to see in just Jira.
(1:00:59) And again, that’s another, I believe, plug-in. (1:01:03) So it takes your Jira data and gives you this great stuff. (1:01:07) And so when a manager comes up to you and says, okay, if I give you this stuff, when do you think it will be done?
(1:01:15) You don’t even have to think about it. (1:01:16) It’s going to take your historical data, and it’s going to, through Monte Carlo, give you all of these forecasting as to when it’s going to be done. (1:01:26) If you’re working consistently, then it’s really like a great tool.
(1:01:32) I haven’t actually seen managers ask for that type of stuff. (1:01:35) It may be because they don’t know about it, but if they ever did ask me about it, that’s how I would do it. (1:01:42) I wouldn’t do any more work than just going into that tool.
(1:01:45) And in two seconds, I can hand them that data.
Speaker 1
(1:01:49) I like the fact you bring in the notion of using historical data, because I think the concept of using historical information to increase forecast accuracy is a topic all by itself. (1:02:03) We could spend a whole meetup just talking about approaches to do that.
Speaker 2
(1:02:07) Well, what I’ve seen is that if people don’t give them this type of data, what they’re going to do is they’re going to make it up themselves.
Speaker 1
(1:02:16) They’ll make it up.
Speaker 2
(1:02:17) And that’s usually bad. (1:02:19) So you might as well just take a tool. (1:02:21) It’s always bad.
(1:02:22) Yeah. (1:02:23) So if you could take a tool based on historical data, then that’s the better way to do it versus them trying to convert velocity to hours and then just make it up, basically.(1:02:36) And then you’re held responsible for it anyway.
Speaker 3
(1:02:40) Dave, what is the JIRA tool called? (1:02:44) Which tool? (1:02:45) The tool you said aligned with JIRA?
Speaker 2
(1:02:48) Well, both tools are plugins. (1:02:52) JIRA is one, and then the other one is Actionable Agile.
Speaker 3
(1:02:55) Actionable Agile. (1:02:56) Actionable Agile, yeah. (1:02:57) Right, right, right.
(1:02:58) Thank you. (1:02:59) Jeff, one question, one question slash comment. (1:03:01) In my experience, I’ve used the vision and the SWOT and the tools to kind of drive the portfolio roadmap and other things.
(1:03:09) So I didn’t see that mentioned in your deck. (1:03:12) So have you tried to use that, leverage that, or is your solution not including the vision of the roadmap?
Speaker 1
(1:03:21) No, no, it absolutely does. (1:03:23) And again, yeah, this was a little bit of a light touch, but whenever we talk about the concepts of strategic alignment within the portfolio, yes. (1:03:32) The vision, the mission, if you have canvases for your value streams, for your portfolios, things like that, those are all examples of ways that we codify, I think, strategy and how we’re looking forward.
(1:03:46) And making sure that the things we’re putting in the portfolio are in alignment with those themes and canvases and visions and missions and so on. (1:03:55) I think that all comes under that umbrella of assessing strategic alignment. (1:04:00) Wonderful.
(1:04:00) Thank you. (1:04:01) Totally agree. (1:04:02) Yeah, absolutely.
(1:04:14) Okay. (1:04:17) Well, if that’s it, Darian?
Speaker 4
(1:04:20) Yeah, that’s it. (1:04:21) Thanks, everyone, for joining. (1:04:23) Thank you, Jeff, so, so much for presenting.
(1:04:26) Lovely presentation. (1:04:26) And we’ll see everybody next month. (1:04:29) Thank you.