Are You Struggling to Scale Your Organization ? Need agility but dubious of process BS/dogma? I share reflective, pragmatic, principled takes on how to approach scaling your organization leveraging the essence (rather than theater) of product operating models, agile practices and frameworks, and business operating systems such as EOS and OKRs.
What Do Busy Portfolio Kanban Boards Tell Us?
|
They tell us a story of slow, centralized decision-making, often related to classic program management culture combined with an iron spaghetti portfolio where delivering product outcomes often requires wide collaboration across teams and even teams of teams. An agile, product-oriented portfolio relies mainly on providing strategic guidance and alignment, not managing every Portfolio Kanban board investment. This is why, once you establish a Portfolio Kanban board to see the investments you’re managing, you should think about whether you actually NEED to manage these investments at the portfolio level. It might be time to inspect and adapt the definition of portfolio workflow – focusing on which items should flow at the Portfolio level. A few elements we often consider are –
Essentially, we want the portfolio conversations to focus on the larger, higher opportunity/risk high cross-product collaboration investments, and decentralize decision making to empowered product teams for other investments. It doesn’t mean portfolio leaders don’t care about these other investments. But they trust their product teams and maintain a lighter touch interface, compared to those investments they want to focus on. Here’s what you can do – Analyze the cards on your portfolio kanban according to these 3 criteria. Let’s say a grade of 1-3 for each. This means the overall grade for each investment/card will be between 3-9:
(feel free to add a criteria and use whatever formula works for you – I provide this here just for illustration purposes) What if it turns out most of your cards SHOULD be portfolio-level cards? One option is that you’re running a good portfolio approach already with empowered stream-aligned product teams working on smaller, more focused investments most of the time. But if you have lots of cards AND it looks like they should stay at the portfolio level – now its time to think about how to descale your portfolio by organizing around products, and building products using continuous discovery. (in other words, it is time to continue your product portfolio agility journey…) What does your Portfolio Kanban Board tell you? The post What Do Busy Portfolio Kanban Boards Tell Us? appeared first on Yeret Agility. |
Scaling w/ Agility
Are You Struggling to Scale Your Organization ? Need agility but dubious of process BS/dogma? I share reflective, pragmatic, principled takes on how to approach scaling your organization leveraging the essence (rather than theater) of product operating models, agile practices and frameworks, and business operating systems such as EOS and OKRs.
"Instead of Portfolio Management - Just Create Product Teams" - Have you heard that before, Reader? While I understand the angst against Portfolio Management Theater as a solution to Agile Theater... And while I agree wholeheartedly that the north star is to descale by reorganizing around value I find reality a bit more nuanced....Most leaders I encounter can't "just create product teams" their way out of decades of complex products and systems. None of them are Jeff Bezos - they don't have...
Product development concepts come in handy every time you're developing something. Whether that thing is software, product, or even a point of view. The first sentence in this email is a point of view (POV). I want this point of view to be effective - I want people to understand what I mean, be intrigued by it, take action, and hopefully see me as a thought leader / expert in this space that they'll want to follow / listen to more. It took me a while to develop this point of view. To carve a...
Context is King You’ve probably encountered this term in the context of AI. You won’t get far with AI, even with amazing prompting techniques, if AI doesn’t have the right context. Many people focus on the Data aspect of context – what’s in our CRM, in our collaboration tools, in our ERP, in any of our vertical systems. Another interesting aspect is the intent – what are we trying to achieve? What is our strategy? What problems are we focused on? Who are the players? Some of that information...