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This week, Dan Neumann is joined by his colleague and return guest, Quincy Jordan! Quincy is a Principal Transformation Consultant and Agile Competency Lead who has been with AgileThought for just over two years. Prior to AgileThought, Quincy was the Transformation Lead for Pivotal\\u2019s Atlanta Office, where he consulted with clients to help them reach enterprise scale. Quincy also served as a Principal Consultant and Agile Coach at SCRUMstudy.com for over six years.

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In this episode, they\\u2019re going to be discussing portfolio management. A lot of times, Agility is thought of as team practices or activities that go around the team. And yet, there\\u2019s a lot of disruption and a lack of clarity that can happen when the higher-level contacts around those teams aren\\u2019t set. And a lot of times, that vision and strategy are being set at the portfolio level. So in Dan\\u2019s and Quincy\\u2019s discussion today, they shed some light on Lean and Agile portfolios in particular, as well as how portfolios fit into Agile ways of working and how it could help. They also provide actionable advice around how to keep the communication clear and transparent, key takeaways around the sustainability of the portfolio, and how to add Agile or Lean components to portfolio management.

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Key Takeaways

How to add Agile or Lean components to portfolio management:

Make sure that alignment is there (when you don\\u2019t have alignment from the portfolio level you run into a lot of challenges around teams not being clear about why they\\u2019re doing the work that they\\u2019re doing and the overall vision)

Capture the vision through a framework (like OKRs) to add clarity

Make sure that alignment is created and that there is a concise and clear vision that everyone can execute on

Ensure that the team knows where the organization is going (so that they know what that the goals are beyond just delivering on a project)

Good alignment from the top-down is critical

You don\\u2019t want to spend time on products that are not going to bring value, so the portfolio of products needs to be constantly reprioritized and reevaluated

Make sure that the team is not putting emphasis or focus on products that are not bringing value to the portfolio of products

Ways to keep communication clear and transparent:

Once alignment is established and everyone understands what the vision is, you then have to make sure that everything/everyone is very transparent about them

Establish good, clear, and frequent communication

Potential downfalls with portfolio management and agile transformations: forgetting to communicate on a frequent basis with those on the ground who are helping to bring this vision to pass (when people aren\\u2019t clear on the \\u2018why\\u2019 they don\\u2019t have as much of an invested interest in the outcome)

Make sure communication is flowing both ways

Value mapping can be a valuable method for making the value creation visible, which improves communication and understanding

Within a portfolio of products, you can utilize Kanban boards which will show all of the products within that portfolio that are in flight and all of the teams that are supporting those products (they\\u2019re also highly visible to all the teams and it\\u2019s a nice transparent way for people to see how their team fits into the bigger picture)

Key takeaways around the sustainability of the portfolio:

Within the portfolio, you want to make sure that you\\u2019re looking at the cross-team dependencies and using an appropriate model that will allow the management of the portfolio to be sustainable

To make things sustainable, you need to look at what the post-transformation sustainability and the overall sustainability model looks like

Conduct change in a series of \\u2018push and let go\\u2019

Have a portfolio combined of different horizons (reference the \\u2018Three Horizons Method\\u2019)

You don\\u2019t want to spend so much time keeping the lights on that you end up being a \\u2018blockbuster video\\u2019 (i.e. remember to look ahead at Horizons 1 and 2 as referenced in the \\u2018Three Horizons Method\\u2019)

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Mentioned in this Episode:

Quincy Jordan

OKRs

\\u201cHow to Avoid OKR Fake News \\u2014 Felipe Castro at the OKR Forum Amsterdam 2019\\u201d Video

Value Mapping

McKinsey\\u2019s Three Horizons Model

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Quincy Jordan\\u2019s Book Pick:

Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results, by Barry O\\u2019Reilly

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