Accelerating Value Delivery: Agile Measurement & Tooling for Lean Portfolio Management

By definition, an organization’s portfolio of programs and projects meets the objectives of implementing corporate strategy. To better organize their set of projects and achieve strategic goals, many companies create the PMO (Project Management Office) to manage the portfolio, prioritize projects, facilitate communication and bring strategic alignment. This traditional approach is not best geared towards digital disruption, where companies create innovative solutions more quickly amid a high degree of complexity and uncertainty.

Not coincidentally, new approaches have emerged due to the expansion of agile principles and practices in project management. Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) is the process of managing programs and product portfolios, applying Lean Thinking. This result-oriented approach speeds up the planning and reporting processes and eliminates time-consuming governance. Lean Thinking is used in LPM to eliminate waste in activities, services, or processes to improve efficiency and add more value to products.

Through activities carried out in a value chain governed via LPM, the company executes the organization’s strategy and delivers valuable products to the customer. In most modern digital initiatives, however, we don’t know precisely what the contemporary customer, used to experiences like Uber, Airbnb, Amazon, etc., exactly wants. Also, with the fast-paced innovations in technology and products, we don’t know for sure what technology would best implement that want upfront. And both of these also keep changing as we embark on the process of delivering digital initiatives over mid to large time horizons. Therefore, the only real option is to build something, put it in the customer’s hands, see how they respond, and then do less or more of it depending on what we learn from customers, and our abilities to support that change as an organization. Build-Measure-Learn is the only way forward.

While build-measure-learn conceptually is straightforward, the challenge most large organizations face, whether it is about building an extensive retail banking platform using modern Cloud-based technology in the UK, or about improving end-to-end business agility of a mid-sized commercial bank in the US, is, what and how to measure, to be sure we are on the right track, before the final product, is delivered to the end customer. And how to make sure those measures make sense to the board, senior stakeholders, partners and various existing functions — product, engineering, operations and even human resources. While metrics in itself is a huge challenge to solve, with various existing and a proliferation of numerous new ones in the industry, what tools to use which can surface these metrics intuitively and integrate with the current tools organizations already use, has been the next big challenge we have seen our clients face.

This paper attempts to map the current industry trends to a set of three measurement and tooling focus areas, making it easier for Agile PMOs and executives to communicate with their stakeholders.

We have observed five clear trends are emerging across most existing organizations on the path to digitally transforming their products and services:

1. Development teams are putting increasing emphasis on streamlining and tightly integrating requirements and design activities at the beginning of the development cycle — Agile requirements management is getting integration into Agile project management and portfolio management tools.

2. Automation continues its relentless impact on the SDLC, starting to automate and accelerate pipeline pieces where manual-intensive processes have been bottlenecks. This is bringing work states closer, and the need to collaborate between roles is increasing.

3. The need to have end-to-end visibility of a value stream (a team of teams construct delivering value to an internal or external customer) from concept to cash is increasing. This is forcing project portfolio management (category of) tools to integrate with a new value stream management tooling category.

4. Development teams are doing more activities in parallel, doing them earlier in the process, and doing them continuously or in multiple places in the dev lifecycle. Continuous testing with actual production data and online user feedback is initiating new tool needs.

5. Enterprise teams are looking for not only flow of initiatives and people information downwards into projects/feature teams, but there is also a need for progress and health to be relayed back to the portfolio to understand progress/risk against investments in real-time.

An ecosystem of clear, simple measures and tools across three tiers — Data, execution and planning is needed to respond to these trends, and provide confidence to everyone involved around the promise of value delivery.

· The planning tier identifies the vision, strategic objectives and high-level roadmap. This is where the most focus is, and needs to be. Having continuous delivery teams made the tool adoption, organizations are now aiming to use this information intuitively for executives and other external stakeholders.

- AgileCraft, now Jira Align, is actively being experimented by a few of our clients to record long-range multitier initiatives and then map their progress against the work done by various domain teams.

- Planview and Planisware are actively being tried by multiple financial and non-financial clients in the portfolio and value stream management space.

· Execution tiers manage tactical activities to achieve outcomes. This is the area where most progress in tool development and adoption has come over the last few years.

- A lot of our current client teams use Atlassian tools — Jira and Confluence for their day-to-day logging of effort. They are also proactively integrating these with engineering tools (like automated testing, code repositories, and code analysis tools) to provide a seamless view on the speed and quality of the work.

- VersionOne and CA Agile central are actively used by large clients looking to invest and start on a scaled agile footprint proactively.

- Most organizations are looking to integrate these with their existing operational tools like ServiceNow and BMC tools to provide a complete change and run view.

· Data Tiers capture and analyze relevant information. Custom BI tools might be needed to fill integration gaps between the first two tiers or to implement custom organization-specific metrics or trends.

-One of our recent clients in the retail banking space has made extensive use of Atlassian BI plugins, like EazyBI, to roll up data across multiple projects to develop cross-program projections and trends. They are now looking to move towards Jira Align (earlier AgileCraft) to provide portfolio and cross-program reporting.

-Similarly, a significant modern smart digital city development initiative uses PowerBI to aggregate data across central infrastructure platform provider and multiple tenants of the platform to make sense of the requirements and progress against the implementation of those requirements.

Across these three tiers, especially for mid to large existing organizations on the path to digital business transformation, we believe there are three crucial categories of measurements and tools to focus on:

1. Agile Planning & Portfolio Management

Visibility into the portfolio and value stream is critical to make decisions to maximize business value. Optimizing the value delivery chain well beyond traditional ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) is a crucial contributor to better business outcomes. More emphasis is, therefore, on getting visibility into this end-to-end value stream. There is no one vendor which provides metrics support and tools for end-to-end visibility across the value stream. Successful adoption strategies will need to allow for obsolescence and replacement at every point in the toolchain. A 1–2-year time horizon is typically suitable for planning these tool investments. Agile project management needs to be extended upwards and leftwards to include tools covering portfolio-wide management and lifecycle management.

Based on business value and maturity, here are some possible portfolio and value stream management measurement and tooling options:

Among the various large organizations we have researched or directly worked with, there is a different level of maturity across the digital business transformation continuum, and hence the usage of these measurements and tools also differ:

• Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) — Currently uses Planview for their portfolio management needs, but do not have a direct tool mapped to the measurement of its value streams.
• Barclays — Currently uses VersionOne for value stream management and Agile planning, but do not have a direct tool used in the portfolio management space.
• US Bank — Uses Tasktop in the value stream management space.
• Klarna — Currently uses JiraPortfolio, but would be looking to move to AgileCraft/Jira Align soon.

2. Enterprise Collaboration

Enterprise collaboration is specifically essential now than ever, as teams are heavily distributed across homes, offices and geographies owing to the different levels of lockdowns in different parts of the world. There are precisely three dimensions that appear to be most important in this collaboration space:

· Content Services (Alfresco, Box, Microsoft, OpenText, etc.): Increasing the ability of workers to locate, retrieve and manage all types of content boosts information sharing and shortens the decision-making process.

· Team Messaging (Zoom, MS Teams, Slack, Cisco WebEx, etc.): Teams can self-organize by establishing an activity stream for a topic, team or other concepts. This saves time, boosts effectiveness and provides a conversational style of communication (unlike email).

· Collaborative Work Management (Smartsheet, Google Docs, Workfront, Wrike, Box Document etc.): Worker and manager productivity increases where information sharing, decision-making, content development and project management are all aligned in one space.

Based on business value and maturity, here are some possible collaboration tool options:

Here are some collaboration tool examples from the industry:

• HSBC, Barclays: Zoom
• Liberty Mutual Insurance: Slack
• Allstate Insurance: Box
• Lloyds Bank, SAP: Microsoft Teams
• Fidelity Worldwide Investment: Sharepoint

3. Continuous Delivery & Release Automation

Continuous delivery and release automation (CDRA), as mentioned earlier, is specifically responsible for crunching the build-measure-learn cycles, and making the innovation experiments cheaper and viable for large organizations. There are specifically three areas where CDRA benefits are most visible:

Automate digital pipelines: CDRA simplifies what previously has been a challenging and often manual process of software and systems deployment, from building, testing and packaging software to provisioning infrastructure at speed and scale.

Enable faster product iterations: Speed-to-market is increasingly important in the platform economy, and CDRA allows products and services to be “discovered” faster via market exploration and feedback.

Improve end-to-end management and visibility: An automated and integrated pipeline offers far greater potential for visibility and measurability across the end-to-end digital value stream.

Based on business value and maturity, here are some continuous delivery measurement and tooling options. This is the area where most progress has been made in the last few years and hence we see maximum options.

For portfolio management to work effectively, portfolio-level tooling would need to integrate well with collaboration and continuous delivery tooling in play. Most organizations report 3x to 5x productivity gains by the use of integrated toolsets across the three focus areas mentioned above. If these focus areas are implemented and integrated well, here is how a final end-to-end measurement and tooling ecosystem under a modern lean portfolio management function might look like:

Author: Rishi Srivastav, Sr. Director, Agile Program Management