Actionable Lean Portfolio Management - overview

How to make your business stick out

Business Driven Development (BDD) is happy to offer a training concept where we will share the responsibility for business outcomes with our clients.

Summary

The aim of this course is to support the setting-up of Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) for your enterprise or a full-fledged business unit. LPM is significantly different from “traditional” portfolio management as it has much shorter learning cycles and incorporates entire value streams in a flow-based delivery.

In this course, you will learn the most critical and practical aspects of Lean Portfolio Management, and you will get the opportunity to align your strategies with Value Stream funding and Lean Governance. Unlike open classes and other off-the-shelf courses, exercises will target your environment, and you will get the time to create real content as well as setting up your organization.

When innovation and speed are essential, one of the best ways is to get the right people together and provide guiding facilitation. Therefore, this course is only applicable as an in-house event where all attendees are physically present. The length of the training is flexible, but you need to give full attention.

The backbone of the course is the concept of Lean Portfolio Management created by Scaled Agile. The scope is 3.5 days packed with hands-on theory, creative workshops, and decision-making. A combination of a proven Lean-Agile framework and practical experience will make your business perform at a much higher level than most organizations.

The course days are further amplified by a preparation day intended to make sure that the needed prerequisites are in place. The training cannot be carried out unless there is a mutual agreement that the necessary preconditions will be fulfilled.

A cost price, in combination with an optional value-based price, will ensure the training will not just be an expense for you. This pricing model means that there is a compelling incentive to achieve measurable business benefits. Without business benefits, the course fee will be market record low. However, when you can observe sustainable improvements, you possibly want to pay an additional fee, calculated as a fraction of the value increase.

Target Audience

The setup of the training is aimed at business managers and executives who understand the enterprise’s financial, technical, and business contexts and who has the ultimate responsibility for the business outcomes.

It is impractical to expect the, often called C-level, executives to participate in all the work included in LPM. Especially administrational, process, and coordination work needs to covered by roles such as Enterprise Architect, Epic Owner, Solution Portfolio Management and Agile Program Management Office.

Therefore the outline of the course is divided into three parts:

• Day one is intended for the overall concept, initial decisions where authority and management buy-in is needed.

• Day two and three is the practical work to make the LPM work going.

• The fourth day is a half-day for final decisions and establishment.

The individuals with the highest level of decision-making and financial accountability need to participate only at days one and four. Who is needed to participate in days two and three will be determined from practical prerequisites to drive the collaboration throughout the organization.

The advanced article Applied Enterprise Workflow with the SAFe Portfolio Kanban at the SAFe webpage gives some insights into the practical work.