LPM, also known as Lean Portfolio management, refers to how senior leadership uses lean principles and systems thinking approaches to align strategy with execution. Portfolio management teams apply these principles and approaches to strategy and investment funding, Agile portfolio operations, and governance.
The primary goal of Lean portfolio management (LPM), is to align agile development with business strategy and the primary focus of the company is to deliver value through products and solutions to customers. Incorporating agile and lean portfolio management offer a path to improving business agility.
What Are The Objectives Of Lean Portfolio Management?
Lean is not just a method, but it is a philosophy that we are trying to spread in our business. It's not an easy path and requires more than just learning a new method of business management.
- Strengthening the output - one of the ways one can maximize the output is, by managing the backlog of investment and finding the opportunities from that and also by managing the WIP across the multiple teams to speed up the delivery process.
- Preventing the blockage - Using a portfolio budget, we can balance funding for capacity with the demand for opportunities that have the highest value.
- Always indicate good servant leadership - A good servant leader always ensures your organization keeps delivery cycle times low.
What Are The 3 Dimensions Of Lean Portfolio Management?
Lean Portfolio Management is the practice of managing a portfolio of projects in order to achieve the desired outcome. It is a part of the Lean Enterprise movement, which seeks to eliminate waste from business processes through the application of lean principles. The three dimensions of Lean Portfolio Management are:
1. Strategic Portfolio Review
In a strategic portfolio review event, all strategies, implementations, and budgets are aligned continuously. The event aims to achieve and advance the portfolio vision. Typically, PI Planning is held quarterly, at least one month before the next PI Planning, to enable value streams to prepare and respond to any changes.
2. Portfolio Sync
The portfolio sync provides visibility into how well the portfolio is progressing toward meeting its objectives. This event has a more operational focus than the strategic portfolio review, which typically occurs monthly. Topics include reviewing epic implementation, the status of KPIs, addressing dependencies, and removing impediments.
3. Participatory Budgeting
SAFe® PB is a participatory budgeting event that involves stakeholders in deciding how to invest in a portfolio of solutions and epics. In order to finalize the value stream budget, the resulting data is used. A PB budget is typically adjusted twice a year. In the absence of frequent adjustments, spending is fixed for too long, limiting agility. They may freeze up and become indecisive, unable to commit to any near-term course of action.
What Is The Primary Focus Of Lean Portfolio Management?
Both LPM and traditional PPM share the same goals, but the difference is that they have some significant differences that offer some substantial incremental advantages. In Lean Portfolio Management (LPM), senior leadership ties strategy to execution by applying lean principles.
The primary focus of lean portfolio management is to align Lean-Agile development with business strategy.
The concept of lean portfolio management involves applying lean principles to the traditional functions of portfolio management, as well as applying a lean-agile mindset.
In order to implement Lean Portfolio Management, we must shift from annual planning cycles with fixed scope expectations to more agile and fluid rolling-wave planning managed by a Portfolio Kanban system.
Why Lean Portfolio Management?
It is common for organizations that define projects for over a year to get trapped in situations where teams are encouraged to achieve out-of-date goals rather than deliver value and seek early feedback. A lean portfolio management method helps an organization achieve the following:
- For larger initiatives, shift operations focus to delivering incremental value at shorter intervals.
- Shorten feedback loops by leveraging the cadences. An organization can measure progress toward its target outcomes by collecting feedback from internal teams, external focus groups, customers, or end users.
- It's important to apply the feedback to reinvest in ideas that produce good outcomes and downshift those that do not.
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