Agile Rising’s Richard Knaster, SAFe Fellow and Chris Ruch, CEO, SPCT cover what successful organizations are doing when implementing Lean Portfolio Management and the benefits of Lean Portfolio Management in this webinar.
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Speaking, today, we have agile rising, safe fellow and principal contributor to safe Richard Knaster, as well as Chris Ruch, SPCT and CEO of Agile rising. We will have a Q&A session at the end of this, so feel free to leave your questions throughout. Chris and Richard will go for them at the end, and I’ll go ahead and hand it over to Richard and Chris.
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Thank you. And just for everyone, the we are being recorded, and we will make the recording available to anyone who joins.
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Alright! So here’s our agenda we’re gonna discuss about.
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Why? Lpm, and what you’re seeing on the right is, we’ve shaded out the bottom part and the top part is where we consider to be portfolio management and safe.
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Then we’ll discuss key Lpm responsibilities.
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Sync on what a safe portfolio is!
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And then the real meat of the presentation is the 5 things successful enterprises due to adopt.
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Lpm. And these are things that Chris and I have found to be successful at many different organizations, and we hope that you will find them to be helpful in your Elbm adoption.
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So one of the reasons we want to look at why Lpm, and I’m finding that more and more organizations have the similar challenges.
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For example, their agility is limited by annual planning project cost accounting and inflexible budgets, where they do annual budging, and you can’t adjust the budget a continuous overload of demand.
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There is always more things in the funnel. Then there is possibility to do all that work.
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I think, one of the most important things here is. There is the gap between the strategic goals of leaders and the bottom up execution of teams.
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We really want to have good strategy aligned with execution.
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The other thing that costs large delays is that there’s overly detailed business cases that haven’t lots of assumptions, and the forecasted cost and benefits are rarely on target.
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So we’re spending a lot of time on these lean business on business cases.
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Not lean business cases we’ll talk about that later.
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A lot on business cases, but we’re really not getting the value of those business cases.
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When our costs and assumptions and our benefits are not on target.
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We also do big upfront bets on large projects because of the project model, and that often results in developing solutions that don’t really provide the intended benefits.
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And then finally, what I find is many organizations, confuse, output, and outcomes, outputs are things like features and stories that we develop, and the outcomes are the business outcomes that occur.
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As a result of those outputs, so sometimes features are result in a business result, and sometimes they don’t.
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So we can’t equate features to business outcomes.
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So we just go briefly over the key responsibilities of Lpm.
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And if you’re interested in diving deeper on this, we’ll talk to you about a class that I’m conducting shortly, and you can sign up for it.
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We provide you the link. So the responsibilities of Lpm.
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Fall along the lines of 3 dimensions, strategy and investment funding agile portfolio operations and lean governance.
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And you see here that the responsibilities of strategy investment funding is both on the left and write of the triangle.
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So this is probably the most important area of lean portfolio management from establishing budgets and guard rails to ensuring that we have a good fast portfolio through through the system that is, not having delays hey?
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Then the other thing is connecting the portfolio to enterprise, strategy and maintaining a portfolio vision.
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And so we can figure out how to realize that vision. After we do that, we, we develop ethics which will help us get from the current state to the future state that’s one of the key differences between project portfolio management and lean portfolio management with project portfolio management
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we’re selecting amongst the best projects, but selecting amongst the best projects doesn’t always result in getting us from our current state to the desired future state.
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Then you see agile portfolio operations coordinating of value, streams.
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This is a bit more technical, supporting our execution and fostering operational excellence, and then finally, lean governance.
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This is where we do things like portsparatory budgeting to forecast and budget dynamically.
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Try setting that 3 times fast. We’ll also measure portfolio performance and coordinate.
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Continuous compliance. We don’t want that happening at the very end, because that will cause delays in value.
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Delivery. So what exactly is a safe portfolio?
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I get that question many times, and today we define a safe portfolio as a set of related development value.
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Streams that organize their teams and their arts around the products and services that the business develops for particular business area.
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And these development value streams are providing the solutions which are sold by operational value. Stream.
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So I’m not going to go into the difference between those 2 in this webinar, but in our class we certainly shall.
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So each value stream within the portfolio they build, they support, and they maintain solutions for internal or external customers.
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The portfolio also ensures that we’re making investments in the right things with the right level investment to meet the portfolios.
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Strategic Objectives. That’s one of the most important aspects of portfolio management is ensuring that we can get from the current state to the future state.
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Now, we’re gonna start going over 5 successful things. Enterprises due to adopt lean portfolio management.
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The first is adopting and improving Lpm. Practices early in a safe implementation in the past, the safe implementation roadmap recommended that was done towards the end of the roadmap.
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After you have launched a few trains. However, what we found is, there’s a great deal of benefit to start aing that early, and we’ll go over that more.
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We also need to move from the project model to the product model in order to ensure that we don’t have delays in getting the project started or delays in completing the work.
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We also want to optimize the flow of work coming into the portfolio so that it can go through the con bond as quickly as possible, and also at the same time, we anything that comes into the final that really doesn’t belong there.
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We don’t want to spend a lot of effort on that.
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So we want to get those out of the as soon as possible.
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And then as and we want to measure outcomes over outputs so that we’re really understanding if we’re moving a needle in the business, I then finally, we want to use the Lpm adoption roadmap to adopt and improve our practices, so we’ll start
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early and the safe implementation adopting Lpm, but we’re really going to evolve that in perfect, that throughout the safe implementation. Chris, you’re gonna take us to the next slides.
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Yeah, thanks. For, so we’re gonna go through each of these 5 in a little bit more detail.
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And share more. Why, it’s important, and give you some more specifics around things that you can consider in your organization.
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So the first one adopted and improve. Lpm.
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Practices early in the safe implementation, as Richard said, this is one of the things that’s recently changed in the new version of scaled, agile framework.
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And we’re looking at the safe implementation roadmap here on this screen and the safe implementation roadmap gives a high level overview of the the process that we go through for introducing leadership.
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What scale agile framework is, how we train people, how we build aignment around it right?
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And this is following 8 step model to leading change.
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So, a lean portfolio management has been on the roadmap, but it used to only be there at the end the enhanced, the portfolio, and recently the Lpm.
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Was moved earlier in the process, right up there to train executive managers and leaders and there’s a couple reasons for that.
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One is, it’s really effective. It really accelerates the transation.
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When we have leaders leading with the way that they work, not just leaders, saying, we support the way that teams should work, or that agile least trains should work, and in past years, in the earlier development of agile and scaled agile framework there was often this kind of thought that we needed to
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prove that agile worked right. We needed to launch some trains.
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We needed to get some teams going, and then we’d eventually get to a place where the need for lean portfolio management would recognize.
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And the problem with that is that means that you’re really extending the period of time that your teams are trying to work in an agile way.
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But your leadership is continuing to work in the old traditional way and that’s a recipe for creating friction right?
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We’re doing strategic planning, we’re doing budgeting in extraditional, project-based way of working and trying to feed that to agile teams.
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And that’s just a recipe for confusion and conflict and lack of alignment throughout the organization.
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So if we move that earlier and we get leadership changing the way that they think the way that they work improving the strategic planning and budgeting process, then it makes everything easier after that, and it’s gonna flow, much, much more smoothly, so let’s talk about how does that work so
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in. Safe. There’s 2 implementation rod maps.
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One is that high level implementation roadmap that we just saw and the other is an Lpm implementation roadmap.
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And what we’re looking at here is the implementation roadmap.
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That is the the foundation of the of the lean portfolio management glass that Richard has mentioned.
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So what we do in that class is explain in more detail what Lpm is.
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Lay out what a good implementation looks like, and then do a workshop with the leaders that have attended that training to create a roadmap of how are we going to adopt Lpm in this organization?
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Who are the people? What are the processes that need to change?
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What tooling do we need as you can see here the Lpm.
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Roadmap starts with alligning leadership, organizing the the organization around value, and then flowing through the Lpm process of how we create a strategy, how we flow that strategy into our value streams indoor agile, really trained.
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And then how we provide the governance to ensure that that’s implementation is really happening the way we want it to, we’re doing retrospectives.
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We’re doing measures and grow. And then we’re improving as an organization.
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So this Lpm roadmap is a really powerful tool to getting leadership aligned around what they need to do to change the way that they’re doing strategic planning and budgeting so that they can provide the guidance to the rest of the organization around the priority and the
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agile ways of working at the team level. So.
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And, Chris, I just want to point something out. So we have our these rounded rectangles around some of the items on the portfolio roadmap, and these are things that are good to do at the very beginning of your safe implementation, while you’re launching trains so sometimes you
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can’t get executives in the beginning, so you may have a pmo or a lace.
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Who can begin those 5 activities. So that this way you’re beginning your Lpm journey early, getting it all set up and then involving the leaders subsequently to that.
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Yeah, and that role of the Pmo and of leadership is going to be really important to to both.
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The success of your Lpm. Implementation, as well as the success of the overall safe implementation and we’ll talk about the role of a of of transforming a Pmo and some options for what the future State will look like for for a value management office that can
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really power. Your Lpm implementation.
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So when we think about the leadership team, or we think about the the Pmo or an agile Pmo or a Vmo, we need to think about an agile team at this level.
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So when we talk about scaling agile, it’s not just about getting development teams working together or getting agile release trains working together.
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It’s really scaling the mindset and scaling the way that we work to our leadership teams.
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So here we’re giving you an example of a C level C-suite level agile team working together to support the ways to support the vmo and the lean portfolio management function, to drive not only the agile transformation, but to drive the strategic planning and budgeting process
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for the future of the organization. And when you think about the C-suite of a company, what is that?
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It’s really a cross functional organization, right? So cross functionality of what that’s responsible for the functional organization, right? It’s a cross functional team of leaders that’s responsible for the functioning of the entire company.
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So it’s your chief financial officer, your chief marketing officer, your CIO, your CTO security.
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All right, all of those roles are working together to dine.
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Both of those roles are working together to define both the future strategy of the organization, as well as to guide the work and the implementation and get if we don’t have a license around what the vision of the future looks like at the c-suite level we’re
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not going to have alignment with their direct reports, and if we don’t have alignment with their direct reports, we’re not gonna have a line with the teams doing the work either in our operational balance streams or in our development value streams, we’re gonna have teams going
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in different directions. If we don’t have that alignment.
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Starting at the top. Best way to get the alignment at the top is by having a high functioning agile team at our leadership level and here we’re giving, you know, the example of of a C-suite level.
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Leadership team. This could also be a line of business leadership team.
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It could be, you know, at the development portfolio level, right?
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We can think about agile leadership teams at multiple levels within the organization.
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But a good agile team is cross, functional, and it also uses good, agile, best practices, and has things like a product.
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Owner has things like a scrum. Master has things like a coach right?
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So if we need coaching at our team level and at our agile release train level, we also need coaches for our leadership teams and for our Vmo and for our lean portfolio management team.
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So we mentioned this concept of of a vmo or transitioning from a project management office to a newer, more modern value management office.
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One of the challenges of that kind of past approach of waiting until fairly far into the safe implementation to introduce lean portfolio management.
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Was it often meant that a Pmo. Exists throughout that entire time, continuing to try to manage projects in the traditional way, while you have agile least trains in teams trying to execute the work, and the and the vision for the future, and the design thinking in an agile way and that creates conflict
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in an organization, and it often kind of, you know, gave rise to, and us versus them camp, which isn’t healthy.
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For the organization. So what we what we want to include in today’s world is the Pmo leading the way of modernizing and transitioning away from an organization that’s putting together reports or staffing plans or estimating projects and moving to something that’s really focused on what’s
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the value that we’re delivering. What’s the goal that we’re trying to accomplish?
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And how do we prioritize at a strategic level, so that we can feed that priority down to our agile release trains?
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Right. So a vmo, or what you might hear as an agile project manager, office, or an adapive project.
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Management office is, or organization that that uses agile and value stream management principles to define what our strategy is, create the strategic themes, create the high level epics so that those can be consumed by our development value streams and executed on the Vm also facilitates
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the process of the lean portfolio management function, running and facilitating saving events, leading strategic planning, sessions, doing lean, budgeting, participatory, budgeting our portfolio syncs and those sorts of things and all of that fosters a
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culture, of decentralized decision, making right that we’re making things more consumable.
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We’re making decisions at the right level. And providing guidelines.
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For when does the vmo need to weigh in on things?
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When does senior leadership need to be involved in the strategic planning process?
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And when can those decisions be decentralized and and move faster through our system by empowering people at the adj release train level, or at the team level to make those decisions and all of that helps us create a more flow based system that allows us to continually evaluate both what
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we should be doing and what we’re actually doing, and make adjustments to measure and grow assessments, learn and adjust and incorporate those adjustments into the next wave of our planning.
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With that I’m gonna hand it back to Richard to talk about number 2.
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Thanks. Thank you, Chris. So now we want to talk about one of the most important aspects of shifting to lean portfolio management, and that is the need to go from managing work in projects to moving to a product model.
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You may have read this book from project to product by Mick Kirsten.
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I highly recommend it, and in his book he talks about a number of scenarios about the importance of a flow, and he provides a whole flow framework to measure how quickly a value flows throughout the portfolio, as you know, in traditional approach people are organized and functional silos and
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temporary project teams, and it’s very hard to bring work across those portfolios working in working.
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I’m sorry in silos, working in silos, really inhibits agility every time that there’s a handoff from one silo to the other.
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There’s usually quite a bit of delay. So we want to move to organizing people in value streams in cross functional teams and art that uses a continuous flow model.
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The project cost accounting model often is as well due to its annual planning and also just getting the people together to start a project requires people from many cost centers and getting the project started often takes 2 or 3 months, and along with the same project model.
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You typically have big upfront, annual planning and budgeting and it makes it very difficult to adapt when that is kind of fixed.
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Often that budget is created the year before, and all the projects that we want to do in the following year are identified.
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Upfront the other thing that you’ll often see is that the portfolio is used as a central intake for all work, not just project work, but perhaps features and other lower-level work we want our executives focused on strategic things and looking at the the demand which helps us
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achieve those strategic themes. The other big problem is overly detailed.
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Business cases which are based on a assumptions, and the fact that projects are often governed using face gates which inhibit a agility they often cause people to work in a waterfall way because in order to get from one face to the other, you have to sign off for it on each face nothing contrast that to what you’re seeing
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in a lean, agile approach. We’re using lean business cases 2 or 3 pages.
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We’re going to outline an Mvp. Define a business outcome hypothesis and use angel forecasting and estimating methods.
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And we are gonna use a range of estimates. We’re not gonna say it’s 2 million dollars.
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We might say it’s between X amount of money and wide amount of money, and it may take between X and y.
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Amount of time, however, the goal isn’t to complete all the features from an epic.
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It’s just to implement the most valuable features from the epic.
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So we often find that just by implementing 20% of the features in an epic, we get 80% of the value.
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So this is an example of organizing the portfolio around value, meaning that the value streams contain arts which developed the products and services used by internal or external customers and when we reorganize into value streams and arts those are virtual organizations, it
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doesn’t require an Hr. We reorganization all the overhead that’s involved with that, and they trauma of moving people from one functional manager to another functional manager, and also the concerns of functional managers, that I don’t have the same people
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reporting to me what is my role now? So we keep the same functional manager.
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But their role does change to more of a a coach to their staff, and to help them continually grow and adapt, adopt new practices.
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This enables long-lived cross, functional, agile teams and arts without organizing the portfolio around value streams.
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It’s very, very difficult to have stable, agile teams and arts.
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They go at the end of a project. Normally the team despans and they move on to another initiative.
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In this model as long as that product is service exist, that agile release, train, and value stream will also exist, providing that stability, the other thing that we want to do is to implement a dual operating system, and what we mean by that is many organizations have a traditional hierarchy and so you
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have, you know, a functional organization, perhaps one for developers, another one for testers, another, one for Qa.
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People, business analysts, and so well, work doesn’t move through the silos very quickly.
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Instead by organizing any value, streaming network with cross functional arts and cross functional teams which specifically develop products and services, we can move much faster.
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So what we’re trying to do is we don’t want to throw out the traditional hierarchy because it’s still has many benefits.
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It provides the stability that the organization needs, and it also helps keep those processes that have been successful in place.
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Now, this is where functional managers can help start aiming those processes which are inhibiting aibility, and the goal is that we can have also have a a group of people which is safe provides device to network where we can move much faster.
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Like we did when there was a startup. That’s what you’re seeing with those circles. There.
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When anyone could speak to anyone, and things would be moved much quicker.
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The other thing is, we want to move to a continuous delivery model.
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There’s often a start and stop to the projects. We can only start a project once we formed a project team, and that’s until we have gotten people from different cost centers and have gotten that budget approval before you know it before people are actually assigned to working on the project to or 3 months has gone
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by. Compare that to organizing in arts and value streams where we move the work to the people instead of moving people to the work so it’s a much better model.
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And again it enables stable. Long live teams within the value stream!
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It’s in arts. The other thing that you’re seeing here on this screen is the digital agility value stream.
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And it shows how we go from sensing an opportunity all the way to delivering their value and learning, adapting.
00:31:05.000 –> 00:31:10.000
So this would be an interesting article for you to read or to learn about in the Lpm.
00:31:10.000 –> 00:31:21.000
Costs during the transition. We also want to make our traditional projects visible to everyone, because it does take off, take capacity.
00:31:21.000 –> 00:31:23.000
And we wanna make sure that we’re working on the right things.
00:31:23.000 –> 00:31:24.000
And often the projects that we’re working on are not aligned with the strategic themes.
00:31:24.000 –> 00:31:36.000
So if we put them in a portfolio, Conbon, at least they get visibility, even though their process will be different.
00:31:36.000 –> 00:31:39.000
Chris, can you pick up on optimizing portfolio flow?
00:31:39.000 –> 00:31:46.000
And that’s really a direct lead in from the value stream.
00:31:46.000 –> 00:31:50.000
Continuous delivery way of thinking is based on the continuous delivery of value and thinking about that.
00:31:50.000 –> 00:31:57.000
Not just from a development perspective, but thinking about it from an organizational perspective.
00:31:57.000 –> 00:32:16.000
So we wanna optimize flow throughout our entire organization from the idea through the implementation, through the benefit that we’re providing.
00:32:16.000 –> 00:32:21.000
So this is one of the changes in the new version of scaled, agile framework is putting more of a focus on flow.
00:32:21.000 –> 00:32:32.000
The concepts have always been there, but really simplifying the principles and and putting the focus on flow.
00:32:32.000 –> 00:32:45.000
And here’s a definition of flow from scale, natural framework flow occurs when there is a smooth linear and fast movement of work product through the steps in evacuation.
00:32:45.000 –> 00:33:02.000
So where we want to eliminate handoffs, we want to eliminate delays, and we wanna make make good high quality valuable work flow through our system without interruption.
00:33:02.000 –> 00:33:06.000
So this concept is an agile concept. It’s a lean concept.
00:33:06.000 –> 00:33:19.000
But when we put it together with really thinking about it, across our organization, what we’re talking about is value stream management.
00:33:19.000 –> 00:33:35.000
We’re talking about, how do we optimize the entire value stream that’s involved in delivering something of value to our customers or to our to our users and value stream management?
00:33:35.000 –> 00:33:45.000
Takes the concepts of continuous delivery to a broader way of thinking throughout our organization.
00:33:45.000 –> 00:33:46.000
So it’s not just the technical steps that we need to do.
00:33:46.000 –> 00:33:51.000
The automate, a devops, pipeline. It’s all of the business functions.
00:33:51.000 –> 00:34:18.000
It’s all of the strategic planning and budgeting and prioritization and budgeting and prioritization, as well as both development and optational value streams that go into providing what our customers want are the value that our customers are getting so in in the lean
00:34:18.000 –> 00:34:25.000
portfolio management. We’re now putting more focus on this concept of value.
00:34:25.000 –> 00:34:42.000
Stream management spanning the entire portfolio and thinking about the delays that are, you know, our system, not just from a development perspective, but also business and operational delays.
00:34:42.000 –> 00:34:49.000
We’re all now. So now, also calling out 8 specific flow accelerators.
00:34:49.000 –> 00:34:56.000
And those flow. Accelerators exist throughout safe and at multiple levels throughout safe.
00:34:56.000 –> 00:35:12.000
The concepts here are not new, right? We’ve had visualizing and limiting work in process and minimizing handoff and dependencies as fundamental aspects of scale, agile framework.
00:35:12.000 –> 00:35:21.000
For a long time, but we’re highlighting them here, as the key is to accelerate your value.
00:35:21.000 –> 00:35:22.000
Streams, and accelerate the flow of value through your free or lean portfolio. Management.
00:35:22.000 –> 00:35:48.000
So, so we’re not gonna go into a lot of detail around each one of these flow accelerators for sake of time, we can we go into more detail in the classes and the link portfolio management class that Richard is teaching in a couple of weeks.
00:35:48.000 –> 00:36:02.000
But you can see these 8 items are things that are bringing us to a modern way of working right visualizing and limiting work and process.
00:36:02.000 –> 00:36:12.000
Core lean concept that helps us really focus on the highest priority, most valuable things addressing bottlenecks.
00:36:12.000 –> 00:36:19.000
What’s slowing us down? Where are inefficiencies in the system?
00:36:19.000 –> 00:36:38.000
And focus on those in effectiencies focus on the things that are inhibiting flow, eliminate those bottlenecks through our inspect and adapt activities, through our retrospectives, through the metrics that we’re gathering solve that bottleneck and then there’ll
00:36:38.000 –> 00:36:43.000
be a new bottleneck. Move on to that next bottleneck, minimizing.
00:36:43.000 –> 00:36:48.000
Yeah, pointing at one thing. What is new is that we renamed principle Number 6 to make flat.
00:36:48.000 –> 00:37:02.000
Value flow with that interruption, and the number 8 there remediate legacy policies and practices has been added, and perhaps you can fill us in about that.
00:37:02.000 –> 00:37:23.000
Yeah, so thanks for calling that out, we’ll get to remediating legacy problems with Number 3 minimizing dependencies and handoffs gets to how we organize our teams.
00:37:23.000 –> 00:37:50.000
And as Richard talked about with the dual operating system and organizing around value, organizing around value is the way that we minimize dependencies which allow us to develop faster, get faster feedback and focus on working and smaller batches and smaller Q lines, as richard said up to new things that
00:37:50.000 –> 00:37:55.000
are here optimizing time in the zone. And remediate a legacy.
00:37:55.000 –> 00:38:19.000
Policies and practices, getting optimizing time in zone allows our teams to focus on value delivery, remove distractions, remove inefficiencies in the system, and those distractions and inefficiencies, and the systems are often legacy practices that are hanging around meetings
00:38:19.000 –> 00:38:42.000
that no longer serve a function, or are duplicative review processes that slow down the process and also don’t encourage decentralized to decision making and any number of other kind of legacy baggage that may be built into your policies procedures.
00:38:42.000 –> 00:38:49.000
The the way teams are organized. The way code is being developed and reviewed. Right.
00:38:49.000 –> 00:38:56.000
All of those things are things that we need to evaluate and not just continue to work in the old way that we work.
00:38:56.000 –> 00:39:13.000
And then come and lay safe on top of it, and rename things while allowing those inefficient legacy practices practices to continue.
00:39:13.000 –> 00:39:16.000
With that we’re gonna hand it back over to you, Richard.
00:39:16.000 –> 00:39:20.000
Yeah. So the next thing we want to talk about is measuring outcomes over outputs.
00:39:20.000 –> 00:39:30.000
And as I said, many organizations confuse the 2, and if you’re not focusing on outcomes and just on outputs, you’re really not gonna deliver more value flow.
00:39:30.000 –> 00:39:39.000
In fact, I find many organizations have become feature factories where we’ve gotten really good.
00:39:39.000 –> 00:39:48.000
At knocking out features quickly. But do we know if any of those features are actually delivering value?
00:39:48.000 –> 00:39:53.000
Do we actually even know? Has anyone even found a new feature?
00:39:53.000 –> 00:40:01.000
Did the features result in higher customer satisfaction? Did they result in change in buyer behavior?
00:40:01.000 –> 00:40:05.000
And if we don’t look at that, then why are we creating that work?
00:40:05.000 –> 00:40:09.000
If we’re not really measuring those business outcomes.
00:40:09.000 –> 00:40:26.000
So in safe, we have a whole bunch of metrics which talk about those outcomes in fact, it’s part of the safe metrics mode which is now called measure and grow, and it really has 3 parts to it.
00:40:26.000 –> 00:40:34.000
Does our portfolio meet the needs of the customers and the business, so we will be looking at business outcomes.
00:40:34.000 –> 00:40:50.000
So all is the work moving fast throughout the portfolio, from the top of the portfolio all the way down to the teams, and how competently are we doing our work?
00:40:50.000 –> 00:40:57.000
Are we achieving business agility? Are we doing the right behaviors and practices for lean portfolio management?
00:40:57.000 –> 00:41:06.000
Or if we’re working on an art or we’re an rte, how are we aligning with those practices and mindsets?
00:41:06.000 –> 00:41:30.000
We wanna measure that so that we can improve that? And Lpm has some responsibility to ensure that we share good patterns across the portfolio so that another part, or even another portfolio can improve based upon what we’ve learned from those existing arts.
00:41:30.000 –> 00:41:38.000
So here’s an example of business outcomes. So you might be familiar with pirate metrics.
00:41:38.000 –> 00:41:46.000
Is the acquisition, and my screen’s being blocked here.
00:41:46.000 –> 00:41:56.000
Excuse me 1 s. Sorry about that.
00:41:56.000 –> 00:42:01.000
So acquisition, activation, revenue, retention and referral.
00:42:01.000 –> 00:42:07.000
The other thing that we want to look at is our metrics regarding our fulfillment.
00:42:07.000 –> 00:42:18.000
If we’re doing consumer loans as an example, or we’re in auto store, you know what is the conversion rate for people purchasing our products.
00:42:18.000 –> 00:42:22.000
How long does it make? How long does it take to make a decision?
00:42:22.000 –> 00:42:27.000
What is our net? Promoter score? What is our customer?
00:42:27.000 –> 00:42:31.000
Lifetime value. That’s really measuring business outcomes.
00:42:31.000 –> 00:42:36.000
And then we also want to look at customer support. What is our upstanding tickets?
00:42:36.000 –> 00:42:44.000
Is our customers satisfied? Do you know, do we take care of most problems on the first call?
00:42:44.000 –> 00:43:02.000
What is our meantime to resolution, and so on. If you are in manufacturing, you’d be looking at things like units sold, cost of goods, inventory turns, and the cash concept to cash cycle time again, we can’t just look at outputs.
00:43:02.000 –> 00:43:12.000
And most developers are not necessarily versed in this language, and I think one of the most important things that we can do in value.
00:43:12.000 –> 00:43:35.000
Stream management is also to encourage developers to understand how their contributions affect the business, and by them looking at the business outcomes and also being involved in how we measure those outcomes, they start to become more interested in the work that they’re doing and also unlocks their intrinsic
00:43:35.000 –> 00:43:41.000
motivation, as they see that their work directly moves the needle in the business.
00:43:41.000 –> 00:43:48.000
Now there are some things that are not easily measured like, how well are we doing on our strategy?
00:43:48.000 –> 00:43:54.000
So for that we’ll use Ops to define the objectives and key results.
00:43:54.000 –> 00:43:59.000
And typically, we’ll use those for strategic themes.
00:43:59.000 –> 00:44:12.000
We can also apply those to epics, and we can also apply them to understand how well are we meeting the business objectives of the transformation?
00:44:12.000 –> 00:44:25.000
The next thing we want to look at is measuring flow, and in Mick Kirsten’s book project to product he defines a bunch of metrics, flow metrics which I’ll have them have been around.
00:44:25.000 –> 00:44:38.000
But I think he did a really good job in packing them together and explaining them, and how they apply specifically to value streams so we don’t have time ticket into each one of these metrics.
00:44:38.000 –> 00:44:46.000
But if you go into the metrics article you’ll see these different metrics, and how they are applied.
00:44:46.000 –> 00:44:50.000
You might know, float time as the lead time.
00:44:50.000 –> 00:44:57.000
You might know, flow. Efficiency is very similar to tracking.
00:44:57.000 –> 00:45:04.000
How much process time there is versus waiting time.
00:45:04.000 –> 00:45:09.000
And so those are really important metrics and then the very last metric thing flow.
00:45:09.000 –> 00:45:15.000
Predictability is something that’s specific to safe and not part of Mick Hurston’s flow framework.
00:45:15.000 –> 00:45:19.000
And this is the used to be called the program predictability metric.
00:45:19.000 –> 00:45:39.000
It’s now called the all predictability metric, and we can understand how predictable is our train in delivering value, and we can even roll those numbers up to A to an art, to a value stream, and even to the portfolio level.
00:45:39.000 –> 00:45:40.000
And so.
00:45:40.000 –> 00:45:42.000
Chris, you want this one.
00:45:42.000 –> 00:45:45.000
That brings us to kind of our wrap up here.
00:45:45.000 –> 00:45:56.000
And so we’re gonna leave you with Principle number 5 as using the Lpm adoption roadmap to drive the improvement.
00:45:56.000 –> 00:45:57.000
So we already talked about the implementation roadmap and kind of the components of it.
00:45:57.000 –> 00:46:27.000
And why? It’s important. And we at Agile rising, believe that this is a very powerful tool for our customers, and we start the Lpm journey by training leadership going through the lean portfolio management class either as as a public open enrollment class like
00:46:28.000 –> 00:46:41.000
Richard’s teaching. In a couple of weeks, or as a private class, specifically for leadership within an organization, and follow that with the Lpm.
00:46:41.000 –> 00:46:50.000
Getting started workshop. And that’s a one day follow-on to the class where we build out the implementation roadmap.
00:46:50.000 –> 00:47:00.000
And we and we create a high level initial there’s only so much work you can do in one day around this.
00:47:00.000 –> 00:47:07.000
But what we can do is create the roadmap for who needs to be involved?
00:47:07.000 –> 00:47:25.000
What’s the high level timeline? What follows to be involved? What’s the high level timeline? What follow-ups do we need in order to align the leadership around implementing Lpm and then all of the organization and strategic and operational and governance items that
00:47:25.000 –> 00:47:36.000
need to eventually be put into place. That roadmap is, generally speaking, of a multi pi roadmap.
00:47:36.000 –> 00:47:39.000
In order to implement all of the practices, get things in place that’s running in parallel with the implementation roadmap for launching.
00:47:39.000 –> 00:47:49.000
After all these trains and launching teams.
00:47:49.000 –> 00:48:13.000
So leaders, come out of that workshop aligned around the path forward, and with a really clear path forward on what needs to be done in order to start making the changes and what we’ll often do as part of that workshop is also kind of leave with agreement on the cadence of
00:48:13.000 –> 00:48:21.000
events? When is that? What is that? Lean, agile center of excellence, and the executive leadership team and the Vmo.
00:48:21.000 –> 00:48:28.000
What meetings are they going to have? What ceremonies in events are they going to use to move forward?
00:48:28.000 –> 00:48:29.000
The implementation roadmap as well as move forward.
00:48:29.000 –> 00:48:38.000
The activities of the LAN portfolio management implementation.
00:48:38.000 –> 00:48:41.000
Oh! That being educated in a class is very valuable.
00:48:41.000 –> 00:49:01.000
It’s even more valuable what it’s paired with, and a workshop or a series of workshops that follow it, that take what’s been learned and a workshop or a series of workshops that follow it that take what’s been learned and turn it into
00:49:01.000 –> 00:49:30.000
an action. So other tools that are available to you in the safe community is the Lpm Practice Guide, which is available in safe studio and safe safe studio is available to any who has taken the lean Portfolio management class, or who has and one of the other safe
00:49:30.000 –> 00:49:35.000
certifications, like Spc. Or and organization that has safe enterprise.
00:49:35.000 –> 00:49:40.000
The safe enterprise, subscription, or ses in that Lpm.
00:49:40.000 –> 00:50:03.000
Practice, guide, you know, are a series of videos articles, as well as the roadmap that we just showed you and templates for that roadmap that we just showed you and templates for that roadmap that can help you align your organization to thinking about what it.
00:50:03.000 –> 00:50:13.000
Would take to implement Lpm, so if you have access to safe studio, recommend you, go out and check out the Lpm Practice Guide.
00:50:13.000 –> 00:50:22.000
If you don’t have access to safe studio, recommend you, take records class because you’ll get access to safe studio.
00:50:22.000 –> 00:50:33.000
After that class, or talk to us about getting a safe enterprise subscription for your organization, and that concludes our talk today.
00:50:33.000 –> 00:50:36.000
Turn it over to Russ to wrap things up.
00:50:36.000 –> 00:50:49.000
Thanks. Chris, and I just say that was just a fantastic pirate impression from Richard, and if anyone’s interested in maybe hearing more of that, and or any more about Lpm.
00:50:49.000 –> 00:50:55.000
We have a course coming up May eleventh and twelfth, and the first 15 people to respond or receive a 15% discount on the course.
00:50:55.000 –> 00:51:10.000
So Julie will’ll send the the link out to everybody if you’re interested, please feel free to register, and I’m sure it’s gonna be a great course top by the person that created the course itself.
00:51:10.000 –> 00:51:16.000
So, and then I think we wanted to go to one more thing and just talk about maybe some incremental help that we can provide next slide.
00:51:16.000 –> 00:51:23.000
Please.
00:51:23.000 –> 00:51:34.000
There we go. So one of the things that we saw a need for is this not always necessary to have a large engagement to help organization through some challenging times?
00:51:34.000 –> 00:51:48.000
So we have a micro consulting, offering that oops that allows us to divide just in time coaching, advisory services, organizations that really helps them pass certain challenges.
00:51:48.000 –> 00:51:54.000
So if you’re interested in learning more about Lpm, maybe walking through some of the things.
00:51:54.000 –> 00:51:56.000
But you know, don’t really want a large engagement.
00:51:56.000 –> 00:51:57.000
This is a really easy way to do that. The Opm workshop can be part of this also.
00:51:57.000 –> 00:52:06.000
The workshops you see here value street management and the Agl. Center of excellence.
00:52:06.000 –> 00:52:17.000
So if there’s interest there, please feel free to reach out, and we can certainly talk to you about those, and and set some time up to walk through your needs and how we can help.
00:52:17.000 –> 00:52:18.000
With that I wanna.
00:52:18.000 –> 00:52:20.000
And I just wanna meet you that Chris has experience with technology business management.
00:52:20.000 –> 00:52:26.000
He can actually teach the course for that. And if you haven’t looked at technology business management, I see.
00:52:26.000 –> 00:52:36.000
Suggests you do because one of the important things is to understand how much money are we saving?
00:52:36.000 –> 00:52:45.000
In our organization across different business units, across value streams, across arts, and really understanding all of getting our value from the money.
00:52:45.000 –> 00:52:51.000
So Chris is a certified instructor in that, and I really encourage you to look it up.
00:52:51.000 –> 00:52:57.000
You can go to tbm.org to find out more about it.
00:52:57.000 –> 00:53:18.000
And we’re seeing lots of interest in Tbm plus agile, because Lpm is really bridging the finite aspects of the Lpm. Is really bridging the financial aspects of of how we develop new products in an agile way and Tbm is really focused on
00:53:18.000 –> 00:53:34.000
finance. The Lpm. Is really focused on the strategic budgeting and planning processes and the thing that we really don’t like to see in organizations is where there’s one group implementing Tbm and another group implementing agile, and they’re
00:53:34.000 –> 00:53:42.000
not working together and implementing it as one consolidated change management approach.
00:53:42.000 –> 00:53:55.000
And with that I think we’re gonna move on to the last couple of minutes that we have together and do some question and answer.
00:53:55.000 –> 00:53:59.000
Alright! Let’s see.
00:53:59.000 –> 00:54:10.000
Is there an R. A. C. I. For agile executive teams in developing and maintaining the Lpm.
00:54:10.000 –> 00:54:15.000
Yes, so there really isn’t a racy matrix for the agile executive team.
00:54:15.000 –> 00:54:24.000
In fact, we don’t typically use racy matrixes within safe and also in the general agile community.
00:54:24.000 –> 00:54:28.000
Not that they’re bad, but we really want to have the collaboration.
00:54:28.000 –> 00:54:45.000
And what I found over the years is that when you have a racy matrix, everyone is worried about staying with their swim lane and not going outside those bandaries, and it kind of inhibits collaboration Chris, would you want to add anything to that?
00:54:45.000 –> 00:55:10.000
Yeah, so while we don’t use traditional races for the reasons that the Richard just outlined, we do have some job aides that can help provide guidance to people in different roles really, at all levels of safe that and can
00:55:10.000 –> 00:55:20.000
to some extent provide some guidance on and on responsibilities for each one of those roles, even more so.
00:55:20.000 –> 00:55:24.000
Talk about the key collaborations that they have, and the the kind of skills that we’re looking for.
00:55:24.000 –> 00:55:35.000
So we have some well formatted, job aids that we use as part of our coaching with with customers.
00:55:35.000 –> 00:55:54.000
But when you’re talking about a cross functional team where we want everybody to work together, we don’t wanna be kind of reinforcing silos and just kind of throwing things over the wall from a responsibility perspective.
00:55:54.000 –> 00:56:07.000
There’s a couple more questions out there. So so when we think about kind of the, you know, some questions around the high level value stream budgeting and changing the mindset of leaders.
00:56:07.000 –> 00:56:17.000
And then we think about, you know, funding projects for what’s the change, management approach or path for that?
00:56:17.000 –> 00:56:21.000
Any thoughts on that Richard Chris.
00:56:21.000 –> 00:56:29.000
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s a great question, and that’s probably one of the harder things to do is changing the mindsets.
00:56:29.000 –> 00:56:46.000
So of course, on the implementation roadmap, we want leaders to go through leading safe and to get a good foundation in the framework and understand the mindset and principles of safe plus taking the lean portfolio management class.
00:56:46.000 –> 00:56:56.000
We’ll help them understand the benefits of funding value streams versus funding projects, and that delays that ensue.
00:56:56.000 –> 00:57:06.000
And I think once they go through that training, and they’ve gone through the exercises within that training a light bulb starts to go on, in which they now see.
00:57:06.000 –> 00:57:14.000
Okay, when we budget our values in arts, we know what the cost is, each for each and every pi.
00:57:14.000 –> 00:57:35.000
It’s a fixed cost based upon a number of people, and the time and that model is a lot more predictable than the project model, which is the project ends when all the scope has been done and then we’re also looking at making sure that we are conforming with the planned cost that
00:57:35.000 –> 00:57:48.000
the actual cost meets the plan costs, and that also takes out agility because we’re not concerned as much about meeting the adapting to change.
00:57:48.000 –> 00:57:53.000
We’re very focused on because of the model on conforming to the plan so there’s just many things that just aren’t good about that model.
00:57:53.000 –> 00:58:03.000
And we describe a lot of that in the Lpm course, and I think that’s probably the best way to start.
00:58:03.000 –> 00:58:09.000
And of course, coaching. You can’t implement. Lpm, just by taking a course.
00:58:09.000 –> 00:58:15.000
You also need to get coaching from. People have been who have done that and have been there.
00:58:15.000 –> 00:58:23.000
I also think it’s important to get your chief financial officer, and perhaps you have a person in it.
00:58:23.000 –> 00:58:30.000
A finance person to help them understand. And then, lastly, the Pmo.
00:58:30.000 –> 00:58:38.000
Or hopefully, you’ll transform into a vmo. Has a lot of great relationships already with the agile executive team.
00:58:38.000 –> 00:58:42.000
So, and they can often speak their language better than anyone else.
00:58:42.000 –> 00:58:49.000
Even in Sbc, because they work with these executives all the time they have those trusted relationships.
00:58:49.000 –> 00:58:55.000
So those are the 3 things that I would recommend anything you like to add to that, Chris.
00:58:55.000 –> 00:59:00.000
Yeah. The only thing I’d add to it is kind of the first step or the step.
00:59:00.000 –> 00:59:12.000
After getting the leaders educated. It’s getting a really clear vision of what the products are that you can’t organize around value.
00:59:12.000 –> 00:59:19.000
You can’t organize into effective, agile, least strains if you don’t understand what the products are and how the organization delivers value.
00:59:19.000 –> 00:59:36.000
And it’s often difficult for people within the organization to to see that if it’s a really siloed organization and you’re in a mode of just doing projects right.
00:59:36.000 –> 00:59:41.000
Something gets asked for. We do it. You may only be seeing part of the value stream.
00:59:41.000 –> 00:59:42.000
Even really, senior people in the organization may only be seeing part of the value stream.
00:59:42.000 –> 00:59:52.000
So having that very clear vision, what the products are, how we deliver them.
00:59:52.000 –> 00:59:57.000
Then you can start to build value streams and fund those value streams from that.
00:59:57.000 –> 01:00:04.000
And that’s where we’re gonna leave it for today.
01:00:04.000 –> 01:00:13.000
Thanks everyone for joining today.