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Note that we have some Incomplete Pages That Require Work on this site:-)
Note that we have some Incomplete Pages That Require Work on this site:-)
There is some excellent advice in this book, in simple form, on how to start getting control of your project portfolio. If you are in the mode of saying “yes” to everything coming in, then this book will show you the steps to take to get out of the mess. And the advice is all based on common understanding of agile approaches - use of cadence, visualization, collaboration, managing WIP / queue length, useful metrics, and the development of plans based on reality.
Some key ideas:
To get started just create a simple project board, a simple matrix with who is doing what looking out a few months (say a quarter). Conceptually this looks like:
People | 1H Jan | 2H Jan | 1H Feb | 2H Feb | 1H Mar | 2H Mar |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Team 1 | Project 1 | Project 1 | Project 1 | Project 1 | Project 1 | Project 1 |
Team 2 | Project 1 | Project 1 | Project 2 | Project 2 | Project 2 | Project 2 |
Team 3 | Project 4 | Project 4 | Project 4 | Project 4 | Project 4 | Project 4 |
Unstaffed | ||||||
Project 3 | Project 3 | Project 3 | Project 3 | Project 3 | Project 3 | |
Project 5 | Project 5 | Project 5 | ||||
Project 6 | Project 6 | Project 6 |
This allows you to make visible the decisions that are in place and understand where you are going to. And it helps you to start to deal with “capability debt” (organization cannot improve as it is too busy getting the next feature done).
With this information in place we want to start to better understand when to say yes and, more importantly, when to say no on a project. Idea is to build a simple process for this:
To get to this point you will need rank all the projects that you have. The suggestion in the book is that you use a “buy-a-feature” like mechanism, with all the stakeholders involved.
As we go through this process we will also look at:
All of this is aimed at improving effectiveness of portfolio execution by focusing our capabilities and working to a cadence and limiting our WIP. All of these our powerful ideas. The benefits of limiting WIP include:
The book recommends some interesting metrics for portfolios:
The book recommends that, while the benefits are obvious if you have an agile process underneath this, that you can also adopt some of these ideas to good benefit even in waterfall approaches. For example:
The book is not new, so there are some ideas that I expect could be added to the discussion:
I understand that there is a new version of this book coming out in September 2016 and suspect that these ideas will be covered then. In the meantime, this is a very good summary of an approach to get the project portfolio under control.