Agile Portfolio Management

Transcription

1 Agile Portfolio Management Whitepaper Contents Introduction The Agile Portfolio Continuum Agile Project Management Integrating Agile Projects with Project Portfolio Management (PPM) Agile Portfolio Planning Agile Portfolio Management Creating a Roadmap for Agile Success

2 Introduction Although agile has been widely accepted in most organizations, it is not uncommon to feel an array of emotions or have differing opinions on the topic. Agile can mean different things to different people (especially different roles in the organization), but the reason for adopting agile is clear faster delivery, quicker response to customer needs, and maximum delivery of value. However, agile proposes a variety of challenges for PMOs and executives poor understanding agile principles, fear of misaligned projects, or lack of resource visibility, to name a few. The focus on minimal long term planning does not provide the measurement capabilities or transparency that is required to operate a traditional PMO especially if agile projects are managed in separate system like JIRA or Team Foundation Server (TFS). However, the pros have proven to outweigh the cons, and when agile is done right, it is known to increase product quality by up to 63% and reduce time to market by up to 37%. No debate: Agile makes organizations more effective than ever, which has led to its increasing popularity and acceptance. However, PMOs and executive management still need visibility into the entire project portfolio including all of your agile projects or nobody wins. Beyond visibility into agile projects, the organization must also build a roadmap that leverages agile principles in the context of What is agile? managing resources and the portfolio, not just projects. Agile is a principle that focuses on continuous delivery of business In this whitepaper, we will explore the value. It is a contrast to traditional agile portfolio continuum and provide project delivery principles that focus on efficiency. Agile also recommendations on how to bridge the gap promotes breaking projects into between the ideal agile organization and your smaller deliverables to increase current state to help build a winning enterprise. speed of business value delivery. 2

3 The Agile Portfolio Continuum Before we begin speaking about agile in the context of a portfolio, one must look at the continuum of how agile principles can be adopted in the enterprise. Agile principles can be applied to virtually every level in your organization from team meetings and projects to programs and portfolios. The key is understanding that agile principles are more of a mentality than process, and then aligning the principles to fit the unique needs of your organization. Agile Project Management Most organizations have already adopted agile project management in the form of scrum or Kanban for their projects. These projects are often being tracked and executed in popular systems such as Atlassian JIRA or Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS). The benefits of agile project management is faster delivery of project value. This particular situation is depicted in first box from the left in the Agile Portfolio Continuum pictured in Figure 1. Portfolio The Agile Portfolio Continuum Adopting Agile Principles into Portfolio Management Adopting Agile Principles into Portfolio Planning Responsive to Change To Drive Continuous Value Faster Integrating Agile Projects with PRO or Project Portfolio Maximizing Value of Portfolio ( Right Projects ) Agile Project Management Visibility of Agile Projects at the Portfolio Level Project Faster Delivery of Project Value Figure 1: The Agile Portfolio Continuum 3

4 For PMOs and executives, one of the biggest challenges of agile project management is that they do not have strong insight into the work being executed. Agile teams are not typically creating detailed plans, traditional timelines, or real cost estimates like when using waterfall methodologies. Instead, resource requirements and timelines are measured using sprints, story points, epics and velocity for their respective work. Releases are based on a cutoff date and not around meeting well-defined requirements, but instead based on incremental advances or business value. Unfortunately this information is often not well communicated or understood. Lack of visibility into this agile project work is causing nightmares for PMOs and executive who are focused on reporting program statuses and overall health of portfolios. Although agile project teams and management groups have similar goals getting to market quicker, reducing costs, and increasing value delivery their metrics for measuring the progress and impact remains fundamentally different. Integrating Agile Projects with Project Portfolio Management (PPM) Solving the visibility challenge starts with utilizing a holistic, portfolio view of all agile project work, including resource allocations, prioritizations, and project status. This requires integrating your agile projects with the rest of your PMO through a project portfolio management (PPM) solution that places heavy emphasis on resource Agile Work planning and portfolio reporting. This Portfolio moves your organization into another area of the Agile Portfolio Continuum, where your organization has visibility of agile projects at the portfolio-level. Programs In Figure 2, we see how the visibility needs for the typical enterprise change Projects VISIBILITY NEEDS Agile DEVs Prod Owner Scrum Master/ Prog Mgr PMO Director Exec MGMT Stakeholders based on the role. As agile work gets rolled up from the project-level to the portfolio-level (vertical axis), the visibility needs (diagonal arrow) increase for the different stakeholders (horizontal axis) that are involved. Figure 2: Visibility Requirements Accross Agile Work Levels & Stakeholders 4

5 Lack of agile work visibility creates huge gaps between the different stakeholders causing disconnects and increasing tension throughout the organization. For example, agile developers and product owners are hyper focused on projects and responding quickly to feedback. The scrum master and program manager are typically toeing the line between the projects and programs managing cross-team dependencies, ensuring adequate resources between projects, and release planning thus requiring more cross-project visibility and reporting than other agile team members. PMO directors and executive management are Best Practices Tip: focused on ensuring the portfolio is delivering value on the whole, requiring all relevant project and program data to be rolled up into easy-touse dashboards, reports, and key performance Integrating your agile projects with a project portfolio management (PPM) solution provides visibility metrics. The benefits of integrating agile into resource allocations, projects with your project portfolio management prioritizations, and project status to ensure closer alignment to (PPM) solution can be broken down into three strategic business objectives. major categories: Prioritization and Strategic Alignment Ensure agile teams are focused on executing the right work and tasks that will deliver the highest business value and not the next item that shows up in their queue. By utilizing value-driven decision making, teams can have confidence their work is aligned with business goals. This mitigates low-value work and provides insight when deviations to the approved plan occur. Portfolio Visibility and Reporting Get accurate statuses of agile projects. With visibility into the entire portfolio, your stakeholders can ensure agile team members are tracking progress towards prioritized work. With configurable dashboards and reports available within a PPM solution, Project Managers, PMOs, and Executive Management always know where agile projects stand. Translate agile terms into meaningful business metrics to identify red flags and make better decisions. 5

6 Resource Analysis and Planning Know whether or not your organization has enough people to meet corporate objectives. Get insight into resource capacity and demand, real-time utilization reports, and what-if scenario analysis for your agile projects. Gain visibility into cross-team dependencies for better resource planning and identification of headcount gaps. By integrating your agile projects with a PPM solution, your PMO can bridge the visibility gap between traditional waterfall and agile projects. Agile Portfolio Planning The next area of the Agile Portfolio Continuum moves into portfolio planning finding the right projects to initiate using agile principles. Portfolio planning is challenging as it requires taking into account multiple variables such as resource capacity, budget, strategic objectives, operational maintenance, and most importantly, project value. Utilizing a solution that leverages predictive analytics quickly enables planning a portfolio roadmap of projects based on business impact. Predictive algorithms are used to recommend a combination of the highest value projects your organization should execute based on your organization s largest constraints resources and budget. Similar to agility with projects, portfolio planning needs to be agile as resource capacity is dynamic. You should look to utilize the agile principle of continuous value delivery by prioritizing the highest value projects based on the real-time availability of resources. The advantage of this approach is that it works on both agile and traditional waterfall project portfolios applying agile principles to portfolio planning is completely independent of project execution methodology, but will ensure the planned portfolio is always optimized for both value and resource efficiency. Organizations can adopt agile portfolio planning without ever having a single agile project in their portfolio. This is why we call it a continuum. PMOs often proceed from left to right on the continuum (starting with agile project management), but may begin at any point on the path and work their way up or down to suit the needs of the organization. 6

7 Figure 3:: Innotas Predictive Portfolio Analysis (PPA) enables organizations to develop a plan that maximizes the value of project portfolios based on resource constraints. Agile Portfolio Management The scenario is all too familiar. You finally have your plan, but the environment changes due to customer feedback, market shifts, or executive management decisions. Your immediate response is that it will require too much effort to change your plan because you have to reprioritize your projects and reallocate your resources. It s natural to operate in a set it and forget it mode, especially if your organization practices periodic planning. The bottom line is that change happens, and you need to be prepared to respond. It often means your current plans need to change, or to flat out be abandoned. The benefits of responding effectively to change can be very large and create an opportunity to deliver more 7

8 value through continued alignment with business goals. It is essential for enterprises to adapt to the market environment by moving planning to continuous processes from periodic frequencies. Your organization will eliminate the heavy-lifting of long meetings, manual analysis, and slow responsiveness caused during the annual planning cycle and replace it with more frequent cycles that results in faster delivery of business value. Predictive portfolio solutions allow organizations to compare before and after portfolios side-by-side before committing to changes enabling PMOs to be confident that their decisions will truly generate increased business value. Figure 4:: Applying agile principles through predictive portfolio solutions. PMOs can compare before and after portfolios side-by-side before committing to changes ensuring continuous delivery of value. 8

9 Creating a Roadmap for Agile Success While initially it may seem challenging to create a roadmap for agile success, the key is to think about agile as a mentality for continuous value delivery. Whether your organization is utilizing agile project management or focused on traditional waterfall project execution, the concept of business value still applies. Achieving true continuous delivery of value entails adoption of agile approaches at every level of the organization from teams and projects to programs and portfolio and utilizing project portfolio management (PPM) software solutions that leverage integration and predictive technologies. Respond quickly when conditions change Visibility into agile projects Figure 5: Creating a successful agile roadmap entails focus on continuous value delivery at every level of the organization. PMOs can start anywhere and cycle through different stages of the Agile Portfolio Continuum. Focus continuous value delivery Define portfolio work by business value Prioritize based on business value and resource constrains Want To Learn More? Check Out These Assets: Video: Innotas Portfolio Management Overview View Video Data Sheet: Agile Portfolio Management Read Data Sheet Webinar: Portfolio Planning Done Right View Webinar 9

10 About Innotas Innotas, the leading provider of Cloud Portfolio Management solutions, delivers a seamless way to manage projects, resources and applications across the enterprise. Innotas solves the challenge of visibility and tracking the portfolio of IT and Product Development projects. The solution aligns effort and budgets to meet company goals, while enabling prioritization and agility for planning resource capacity. The result is a standardization of work execution across silos of project management teams. Innotas solutions include Project Portfolio Management (PPM), Application Portfolio Management (APM), Predictive Portfolio Analysis (PPA), Resource Management, Agile Portfolio Management, and the Innotas Integration Platform. Innotas is rated as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Based Project and Portfolio Management Services and a Visionary in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Integrated IT Portfolio Analysis. Founded in 2006, Innotas is headquartered in San Francisco and has hundreds of customers nationwide, across healthcare, government, education and other industries. For more information, visit or call Innotas 111 Sutter Street, Suite 300 San Francisco, CA Tel: Toll-free: info@innotas.com 2016 Innotas. All rights reserved.