Scale Happens in the Middle and at the Top: Agile Portfolio Management and Delivery
Agility artistically. Photo by Pixabay, Pexels. All photos sourced from Pexels and credits included in alt tags.

Scale Happens in the Middle and at the Top: Agile Portfolio Management and Delivery

Setting the scene

Portfolio Management has the purpose to assess, prioritise and select business initiatives that will deliver the most value for the organisation, its customers and partners. Ask: Are you making investments that will allow you to best capitalise on your strategic objectives? Note that a reliable strategy must be in place.

Generally, Portfolio Management authorises the funding of business initiatives and reviews their progress in order to provide governance over continued spending. An Agile environment requires Portfolio Management to select business initiatives with less information. Vision is driven down from strategy to portfolio to delivery at programme and project levels, whilst executed from the bottom up; it is a two-way street.

In an evolving Agile environment where Agility at scale is being applied the delivery vehicles for initiatives become important for new reasons. For simplicity they are still being called programmes but require Programme Management of a different kind.

Programme Management has the purpose to coordinate resources in the most efficient manner to deliver on the selected initiatives. It is the glue that links business strategy to execution. Organisations increasingly utilise Enterprise Architecture as the ultimate current and future state of the organisation and its overall set-up. What is being developed or improved needs to meet the requirements of strategy and architecture alike. 

Architecture blueprint as archetype for business architecture. Photo by Pixabay, Pexels.

An Agile environment of a certain maturity requires to bring the work to the people (rather than bringing the people to the work as in more traditional Project Management). The challenge is in identifying the specific elements of work and bringing them to the right resources required to deliver them. 

This significant shift is rooted in the recommended ‘move from projects to products’ (now explicitly stated within the foundational mindset of the newest version of the Scaled Agile Framework, SAFe 5.0). When scaling Agility, Programme Management becomes focused around a product or product line. The endeavour may no longer be temporary but extend throughout the entire product lifecycle. This has an impact on the roles and behaviours required in delivery. 

Whilst driving the execution of portfolio decisions, Programme Management is responsible for reporting to the portfolio, especially where the expected value is not being delivered and strategic objectives are not being met.

Impact on delivery and oversight

Looking from the bottom up, we come to realise that the role of the Project Manager changes when compared to the traditional role. The required behaviours move closer to the Scrum Master role described in the Scrum framework. This introduces servant-leadership, facilitation, coaching (for vision, working practices, behaviours and mindset, etc.) and most importantly removing impediments to the team’s progress and doing whatever it takes to help the team reach its potential. Not truly novel, delivering things was always about people, but in new clothing and supported by a revived understanding of good leadership.

With scaling new working practices around empowered self-organising teams, protecting the team from inevitable politics is not enough. Many impediments will not be solved at the lowest level and will require being raised to the programme level.

A dilemma opens where this ‘new’ type of Project Manager is expected to drive an ineffective or dysfunctional team, resulting in an under-performing initiative. This will have to include holding the team accountable for their working arrangements of a new kind and ensuring accurate visibility into the team’s progress. To enforce the process effectively, mentoring or more sustainable coaching may be required, based on knowing team members’ strengths and weaknesses and acting on that knowledge (tricky ground where traditional HR or workers’ councils are involved). A more traditional reporting may have to be brought into the mix, especially where insufficient maturity at scale has been achieved and a more directive style of Project Management (or perception thereof) is required during transition.

The role of Programme Management changes equally and so will the Portfolio Management function. They will have to exhibit similar behaviours at their respective levels. Whilst providing status on work progress and value delivery is often a top priority, the leader’s passion at every level is enabling the organisation to improve its business agility.

Agility is a mindset, expressed through behaviours (e.g. servant leadership at all levels), supported by a methodology, expressed through capabilities (e.g. management connecting all levels). It is the seamless combination of both aspects that leads to sustainable success.

For this, the ‘new’ Programme Manager works closely with teams’ Scrum Masters or Project Managers to ensure that collaboration across teams is effective in achieving the product’s development and release goals. Responsibilities include:

  • Enforcing agreements on how collaboration across teams is done
  • Facilitating meetings across all related teams (e.g. SAFe Programme Increment events)
  • Monitoring dependencies across teams, and ensuring that these are planned and addressed effectively
  • Assessing impact of development issues and scope changes on team dependencies and overall execution
  • Monitoring progress of the product development and release
  • Ensuring that risks are addressed effectively during planning and execution
  • Removing obstacles to effective collaboration across teams.

It is deliberate that collaboration, dependencies, risks and impediments feature so prominently.

Photo by Christina Morillo, Pexels.

To exemplify this, consider the following case, the impediments and the somewhat traditional response to them.

Context

  • Two years ago, a long-established manufacturer and distributor started an ambitious journey for significant Digital Transformation. One year in, they called on us to revitalise their transformation aimed at providing complementary services to their customers and entire value chain.
  • The resulting digital platform contains customer-facing applications (some meant to replace legacy applications with critical drivers, such as Adobe Flash end-of-life) and is integrated with all core systems, including product, customer and order management (some replacing legacy systems, at the same time increasing architecture complexity). As external consultancy we entered the programme at a critical time where there were significant challenges including alignment, strategic direction, and programme management.

Challenge

  • Business leadership of the programme had eroded, and wide misalignment made it challenging to liaise effectively between business stakeholders, IT and third-party suppliers.
  • The direction of the complex digital platform was unclear to most stakeholders. Despite much foundational progress, the programme was not well understood in the organisation.
  • There was limited transparency of the programme’s health and of progress across concurrent projects. Low execution maturity in running a programme of this type (notably, novel to the organisation).
  • This uncertainty made it difficult to steer the programme with clear direction and led to delays due to repeated, unstructured renegotiations and realignments in agile ways of working.
  • In general, the programme was drifting, and critical risks related to business needs and reputation were not sufficiently recognised or understood.

Solution

  • Designed and implemented working practice and governance to control the integrated programme, with structured weekly alignment meetings for course corrections.
  • Established wider understanding of the platform and raised awareness of complexity across various IT systems, business divisions and countries (through co-authoring a statement expressing the programme’s sentiment, through coaching and role-modelling expected behaviour and maturity). Started business engagement by building alliances and collective commitment to sustain the culture change over time.
  • Assessed the true health and brought visibility of the programme’s state and progress by introducing and driving a weekly report and dashboard, re-aligning on the purpose of the transformation, stabilising the agile delivery projects and digital integrations.
  • Key to our work was collaborating on a comprehensive programme road map, helping to shape platform migration planning, risk management, legal and privacy compliance, training, communication, support and onboarding customers.

Outcome

  • The client extended a note of sincere thanks for our contribution to the programme and for bringing clarity and ‘calm’, stating that they were “not in state of chaos anymore” (Director, IT Strategy & Architecture).
  • With our support the client was able to steady the ship and bring the programme’s priorities into focus. It was understood that the transformation does not end with setting up technical capability alone; collaboration improved significantly with concerns of stakeholders addressed and maturity increased.
  • Importantly, we helped to create a consensus among senior leaders at the client organisation on strategy and tactical priorities, resourcing and general implementation. Instilled confidence in stakeholders.
  • Through road mapping and realistic forward-planning, we secured additional, vitally required resources for the migration in Australia.
  • “By applying your experience, tact, diplomacy and clarity of thinking, you have helped to set us on course for a successful project implementation in 2020” (Head of Digital, Australia).

Strategic direction matters at all levels and that is why a commonly understood and applied vision is so important. This puts in question what we know about Portfolio Management, how it will be impacted and must adapt with scaled Agility in the organisation.

Agile Portfolio Management as a new philosophy

The purpose of Portfolio Management remains largely unchanged and covers the initiation, funding and management of business initiatives that lead to programme-level and project-level work which delivers the most value for the organisation, its customers and partners. A form of business case, however light-weight, is still required for decision-making.

Photo by Pixabay, Pexels.

The core activities are largely unchanged too, only the way the methods are being applied is somewhat new. Identification and prioritisation of business cases is dealt with in Portfolio Grooming meetings, taking place as and when required (and named after grooming backlogs of work at the lower levels of programmes and projects); selection of new initiatives from a Portfolio Backlog and continuous management of the portfolio is undertaken in Portfolio Planning meetings. The SAFe framework recommends the use of canvasses, Lean budgeting and guardrails for the former and the use of roadmaps, rolled-up milestones, Portfolio Kanban board and metrics for the latter.

The use of a universally understood Vision remains and it must be broken down and applied at all levels, more so now than ever before. New emphasis is placed on the solution intent (against strategy and Enterprise Architecture, their drivers and evolving overall set-up of the organisation, hence ‘the business’). The coordination and collaboration mentioned at the programme level is reflected in the need for organisational alignment across all levels. It is no surprise that Alignment is one of SAFe’s core values. Everyone involved in definition and delivery of value must understand the Vision and strategy and be aware of risks and opportunities that come with the need of making (the right) decisions more frequently.

Agile Portfolio Management requires the definition, implementation and application of roles and practices, supported by artefacts (including tools for planning, estimating and prioritising initiatives, new budgeting process), cadence of events and governance points (e.g. steering meetings, quality assessment), monitoring, tracking and metrics. These may look very different after the change to Agility at scale than they looked before. As initiatives of the portfolio can be treated as Epics, only a Burn-Up Chart may be required for tracking initiative progress. A Portfolio Snapshot view, showing the portfolio position as it stands today may help, or even an event-driven Portfolio Retrospective to improve the portfolio, both recommended by Agile Business Consortium’s AgilePfM guidance. Whichever method is chosen, the ways of working of the portfolio need to be tailored to the specific needs of the organisation, and you will need to be advised accordingly.

Having a clear strategy is just the starting point; it needs to be repeatedly communicated to everybody, not because it will change daily, but because the responses in executing the strategy may have to be adjusted more frequently. These changes need to be communicated frequently too. Ask: does everyone understand what the portfolio aims to achieve and why?

Generally, there is a much stronger emphasis on innovation included in Agile Portfolio Management. The Agile Business Consortium’s AgilePfM guidance places The Portfolio Innovation Hub at its centre; SAFe introduces Strategy Agility as a dimension of business agility. Both bring strategy closer to delivery and (re-)emphasise the importance of effective sponsorship and leadership.

There is an increased need to terminate programmes or projects which may be successful by their own objectives but do no longer represent the organisation’s best resource investment. The related requirement for clear line of sight is expressed in both frameworks.

What does it mean for the organisation…?

Traditionally, the work was split into phases structured around activities. Agile ways structure the work around delivered functionality, including the gathering of low-level requirements, the design, build and testing of functionality, within a time-boxed iteration.

The cadence at the programme level is of critical importance (for example SAFe’s Programme Increment of fixed length and typically 8-12 weeks long), however, it must not be mistaken with Tranches known in more traditional, structured rather than adaptive Programme Management. Having said that, at this level, the differentiation was never that strong with programmes having horizons of multiple years with uncertainty built-in. Managing Successful Programmes (MSP) can be considered mother of value streams (at least one of the many; it is a big family where purists fight pragmatists still).

Photo by Matheus Bertelli, Pexels.

Tailoring of any approach to the organisation’s culture and maturity and to the initiative at hand is key to success. The pure, playbook Agile approach, like any traditional approach for that matter, does not work for the organisation if it does not fit right away. Changes over time through incremental and continuous improvement are critical to advancing any approach. Similarly, the mindset must shift over time (and this is usually the trickiest and timeliest aspect of a transformation to Agility; it cannot be rushed). We have seen traditional acceptance tests added as final steps into Agile delivery, especially where confidence needed to be generated initially among stakeholders who were used to such discipline.

Today’s demand requires that you are fast at decision making, effectively prioritise, balance and manage your change portfolio and have human capital (talent) strategies in place which are supporting business agility. The greater the scale the more it pays out to having suitable risk management practices in place. Whilst this may not matter in small-scale Agile, it most certainly matters in large-scale Agile where portfolio-level and enterprise-level risks, including constraints and dependencies, should always be fully understood. In a more complex context, the Project Manager may have to behave more like a Programme Manager, keeping greater oversight still and connecting to strategic leadership whilst steering the ship. This is the glue after all.

Delivery frameworks.

Finally, we should keep in mind that even the most agile of change programmes, especially when of a certain scale or complexity, requires a reliable, good enough management discipline and appropriate levels of control. Else the Portfolio Management function or any hierarchical organisation will struggle to make sense of the information and fail to create value in the shortest sensible lead time.

Sources

  • Enterprise Agile Made Easier. VersionOne white paper. 2013.
  • Recipes for Agile Governance in the Enterprise. cPrime toolkit. 2013.
  • Organizational Agility as a Strategic Imperative. Prosci white paper. 2016.
  • Agile Portfolio Management (AgilePfM). Agile Business Consortium. 2017.
  • Lean Portfolio Management. SAFe Scaled Agile Framework. 2019.

All opinions expressed in this article are the author's own. February 15, 2020.

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