Delivery: On-site and Instructor-led Hybrid Online
This course can be taken through any of the following:
- In-House – delivering this course at your site.
- Instructor-led hybrid online – for in-house groups or individuals.
Agile Portfolio Management: development workshop
The central purpose of Portfolio management is to provide the mechanism and capability to ensure that all items in a portfolio are aligned with current strategic objectives/needs. It should also ensure that every item will deliver a real (measurable) contribution to the current strategy.
The mechanism to do this is the pipeline approval process, which determines whether proposed items should be included in the portfolio.
Portfolio management is not about delivery (other than capacity). It needs to focus on its core purpose.
At the heart of every well-managed portfolio:
For every item to be proposed for inclusion, there will be a highly focused one-page business case. This is very different to traditional business cases and will be focused on the benefits each proposed item will achieve, for all stakeholders. Going forward, you could call the business case whatever you wish.
- The aim of portfolio management is to maximise the collective business benefits that are achieved, on an continual basis.
We use everyday business terminology:
Terminology matters and can help or hinder teams and organisations. We never use terms that are ‘new’ that have to be explained.
Why? Delivering change is already challenging enough; communication is critical and using unnecessary terminology will seriously get in the way and can make the difference between success or otherwise.
How the session works:
It happens in 2 steps:
- Step 1: involves us discussing the content of your portfolio with you and how it evolves and is updated.
- Step 2: we use what we have discovered in Step 1 to configure the workshop for maximum impact.
Step 2 will use real items from your portfolio as practical sessions to build the information for the pipeline review. There will be considerable learning from this as most business cases are not fit for this purpose.
Course Output: Strawman Process
This is no ordinary training course; it is both a course and a working session. The course will describe each element and then allow you to consider how it will be applied in practice in your organisation. The course will produce a formal deliverable that will go towards your own process for Agile Portfolio management. The cost of the course includes for us to produce this deliverable.
Why choose this course?
- We will show you how to ensure that every item in the portfolio has crystal clearly defined benefits, together with what is needed to achieve them.
- We use an Agile approach to everything, focusing on simplifying and improving communication, key information, improving decision making and most importantly improving the results achieved.
- We have well over 15 years of practical experience of the topic that has the biggest single value to this process. It provides the core data for each item in the portfolio, in a format that is invaluable to this process. We demonstrate this within the course.
Course Objectives:
This course is very different as it has two main aims that we address throughout the course:
- to demonstrate how to adopt disciplined but Agile approaches at the portfolio level
- to enable teams to develop and identify a strawman process within the course.
Agenda: Duration 1 day
Session: | Item: |
---|---|
Developing the pipeline: | |
Change cycles and Portfolios | |
Sizing proposed items | |
Presenting proposals: the Agile Business Case | |
Calculating and Quantifying Benefits | |
Business Case scoring and analysis | |
Portfolio decision making: | |
Pipeline approvals | |
Responsibilities | |
Benefits Mapping - crucial to objective prioritisation | |
Planning cycles | |
Dealing with capacity | |
Prioritisation | |
Measures | |
Structuring the portfolio around business objectives | |
Portfolio refresh: | |
Planning cycles | |
Information requirements | |
Responsibilities | |
Backlog mapping | |
Following this course: | You will have the basis of an Agile based process. |