Course:  Adaptive portfolios

Many organisations manage porfolios of large software projects.  These portfolio plans commit teams to long-running work that can't be interrupted until a project has been completed.  Portfolio plans often commit teams to 12 months of work at a time, or even longer.  This means that these organisations can't rapidly and easily adapt to new and unexpected circumstances that requires a change to the work that teams focus on. 

Adaptive portfolios are ones that are constantly changing according to the demands and strategy of the organisation - when a new priority comes up, the teams can rapidly adjust their focus and effort without complicated disruptions to inflight, long-running projects.

Lean portfolio management means that the effort to manage the pipeline of work in the porfolio is very minimal.  The analysis, prioritisation, planning and preparation of work coming into the teams requires very little effort, discussion and agreement.

This course is for people working in Agile software development, and software delivery projects, and who needs to demonstrate performance improvements.

Types of roles that should attend this course include; Enterprise Agile Coaches, Transformation Leaders, Project Managers, Project Management Office staff, Program Managers, Portfolio Managers, Delivery Managers, Org Designers, Agile Designers, and so on. 

This course is open to any members of an IT team, and also to managers who need to better understand delivery challenges and how to overcome them.

This course is for people with intermediate to advanced skills in project delivery and Agile delivery.  It is designed to help organisations that have been running a Project Management Office to oversee their IT department and their software projects, or if not a PMO, who otherwise operate their IT teams using a project-delivery model.

This course is designed to help people overseeing project delivery to change their processes, work breakdown and delivery model with the goal of delivering value faster, being able to adapt to changing priorities and circumstances very quickly, and enable long-standing teams to deliver work in a continuous stream.

People in management and leadership roles who are responsible for overseeing delivery of a portfolio of projects are encouraged to take this course.  People in Agile Coach and Scrum Master or team delivery roles are also encouraged to join.

MODULE 1

How to break down a portfolio of projects

• How to accelerate delivery by committing to smaller components of each project, and discarding or deprioritising the less valuable parts
• How to change prioritisation to further reduce the size of work, and increase the value of the work delivered

MODULE 2

How to manage a portfolio with heightened adaptability

• How to use planning horizons with lowered commitment levels to maintain a flexible delivery schedule
• How to apply lean portfolio governance to accelerate time to start initiatives
• How to visualise a pipeline of work in an adaptive portfolio for an executive audience

MODULE 3

How to make estimation and adaptability work

• How to organise long-standing teams to ensure a consistent pipeline of valuable work
• How to avoid estimating projects and work while still maintaining a reliable and predictable throughput of work
• How to do planning across multiple teams while allowing for changing circumstances and plans

Moving from a traditional project delivery model to an adaptive and lean delivery model gives many great benefits:

1. Project-based delivery requires a lot of work to be done in advance to get a project approved and ready for kick-off.  This work in the lead up to the project kick-off can be considered waste in that it doesn't deliver any value to end users, customers and stakeholders.  By moving to an adaptive-based delivery model, you can report savings from cutting out the cost of effort in the preparation stage of projects.
   
   
2. Low-value work in the portfolio gets de-prioritised and simply doesn't get worked on.  High-value work continues to take priority, especially in the "Now" timeframe, or the present timeframe.  Avoiding doing unnecessary and low-value work can be measured and reported as cost savings, as the work has been removed from the portfolio.
   
   
3. More organisational objectives will be achieved in the year by removing scope from the portfolio of work.  Delivery teams have limited capacity, and if scope from projects is removed to enable increased delivery of high-value work, then it follows that the increased delivery of high-value work will achieve greater results for the organisation.  The improvement measure would be comparing the before and after Benefits Realisation of the portfolio of work.
   
   
4. Stakeholder satisfaction is better in an adaptive model because initiatives can be more easily time-sliced, meaning that teams are not committed to long-running projects which prevents other more urgent work being prioritised in the short term.  
   
   
5. Individuals in the team are not over-stretched, stressed and exhausted by being pulled onto new and additional projects.  Teams and individuals use the pull model of Kanban to work on the next work item once they are ready, and have completed the previous work item satisfactorily.
   
   
6. Meeting deadlines at the Feature level is more likely to be achieved because teams can more easily estimate, plan and manage delivery of features than of entire projects.  They can also deprioritise low-value scope that interferes with delivering a feature to a deadline.  Time to deliver value is predictable.
   
   
7. Teams are able to get through more work at the Story level and Feature level as a result of less disruption, estimation, planning and deep analysis of projects.  Throughput will increase.