150. LPM links strategy to Impact #3 - breathable organization
According to 16th State of Agile report, more than 70% of agile teams choose Scrum, according to Scrum guide:
“essence of Scrum is a small team of people”
which would be fine if all our agile endeavors were small, decoupled, dependencies are broken, people are co-located, no need to scale. We can handle small scaling between functions or teams by using native Scrum of Scrums...
But, once we scale much beyond that, the structural problem emerges, or "agile chaos", such as:
The list goes on and on, resulted in disappointed leaders, employee burn-out and tension between good and hardworking people, eventually, organizations can‘t catch up breath, and overwhelmed by changes, beyond the control of one single agile team.
Well, it doesn‘t have to be this way, there's a better way, in fact, a much more scalable and sustainable way, to make organizations breathable again, by improving flow of value.
WHAT IS LEAN PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT?
LPM is one of the seven core competencies essential to achieving Business Agility in SAFe, it is not just a collection of practices, or a minimum orchestration, rather management approach to close the loop from strategy to execution through the 3 dimensions below:
Strategy & Investment Funding ensures the entire portfolio is aligned and funded to create and maintain the solutions needed to meet business targets
Agile Portfolio Operations coordinates and supports decentralized ART execution and fosters operational excellence
Lean Governance supports oversight of spending, audit, compliance, expenditure, measurement, and reporting
HOW DOES LPM CONTRIBUTES TO BREATHABLE ORGANIZATION?
have you ever tried to map out all the ongoing initiatives through Portfolio Kanban? If you do, what is the number per Portfolio under management?
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The more you are under the pressure, the more value this exercise can bring: not all initiatives deliver value, or provide clarity of why creating them in the first place, due to vastly different maturity level, visualize the work is one of the most simple and powerful way to accelerate flow, the LPM event Portfolio Sync creates focus, alignment, transparency and clear intent behind, so that organizations can spend their most valuable investment and resources to maximize return.
2. beyond budgeting focus on what really matters, collaboratively
The word Lean in LPM, suggests not only focus on value, but also encourages Lean budgeting is significantly different than traditional methods. It gives effective financial control over all investments, with far less overhead and friction, and supports a much higher throughput of development work. The graphic above illustrates the transition and highlights the three primary steps for adopting Lean budgets.
In fact, the participatory budgeting is actually more fun and engaging than traditional budget cycles, agile teams are your new currency, if there is no more budget, there is no capacity to do more, even we intrinsically want to add more, which lead to traffic jam.
3. Strategic Portfolio Review (QBR) and OKR create space for innovation and empowerment of teams
Apart from Portfolio Sync, Participatory Budgeting, there‘s a 3rd agile events called "strategic portfolio review" (SPR), many organizations call it the QBR: quarterly business review, the reason why it was not used in SAFe, is because the frequency of such alignment varies a lot in organizations.
For example, at Apple, such review among Executive VPs are done once per week in the so called 9 O'Clock meeting, does Apple call it SPR, not really, but the spirit in such meeting matches nicely to the framework.
Another powerful practice, is OKRs, which can be applied for building solutions, measure transformational progress or act as leading indicators for Epic & Portfolio Epics, it basically answers the questions of:
a. what does success look like?
b. how do we know that the implementation of XYZ is successful
The beauty of SPR(QBR) and OKRs is they don't specify all the details, but encourage agile teams and knowledge workers to unleash their creativity, find out better ways to achieve those goals.
To sum up:
LPM competences can unleash true organizational potential by elevating the ways of working vertically across the organization, build transparency and alignment through engagement with agile events, reduce waste and improve focus, make organizations breathable, by achieving more with less.
Source: Scaled Agile, SAFe 6.0