Overview
As a Lean Portfolio Manager, your role goes beyond merely aligning portfolio planning with business strategy. You must also juggle resources and budgets to ensure a consistent delivery of digital products and releases. Additionally, your business peers expect you to quickly adapt portfolio planning to keep pace with rapidly shifting business conditions and strategies. Unfortunately, the reality is many organizations face challenges in adjusting portfolio planning due to a lack of transparency around strategy, investments, and their impacts on business and IT architecture.
Help is here: In leading international companies, strategic portfolio management (SPM) and enterprise architecture (EA) capabilities support the implementation of Enterprise Agile. This approach provides Lean Portfolio Managers with the transparency they need to align and adapt portfolio planning flexibly to match business strategy continuously. Interested in learning how?
The challenges of managing a Lean portfolio
As a Lean Portfolio Manager, you have the responsibility of aligning the delivery of digital products and releases with enterprise strategy. You face the challenge of managing resource and budget constraints while ensuring portfolio planning remains both reliable and agile. Success requires collaboration with diverse stakeholders, including business and IT managers, product managers, and architects. Additionally, good governance, process and transparency are essential for designing, selecting and executing the portfolio.
However, there are several challenges that you may encounter:
Do you have an overview of business strategy?
This should include an inventory of requested and approved strategic themes. and have a transparent process for prioritizing them. Ensure these themes have approved Agile budgets. If not, aligning your portfolio can be difficult.
Do you know the digital products, releases and tactical demands needed to deliver on a strategic theme?
These should be analyzed according to cost, business value, and contribution to strategy. Monitoring the state of delivery is also important to know. If not, prioritizing Agile budget expenditures becomes challenging.
Do you have an overview of the backlog of ideas, epics and features?
You need to have Kanban boards available for backlog management so that you can assess the architectural impact and cost of backlog items. Your backlog should be aligned to DevOps systems such as Jira. If not, you don’t have the backlog under control.
Do you have the tools to implement Enterprise Agile frameworks such as SAFe®?
Ensure you feed portfolio assessments from a system of record, such as ERP, and have analytical tools to identify gaps and anomalies. Include classic waterfall projects for hybrid portfolios. If not, you may miss important information.
Meeting these challenges with SPM and EA
With SPM and EA, best-in-class Lean Portfolio Managers can implement the necessary processes and governance for effective strategy management and portfolio planning. This enables them to support different stakeholders with core capabilities to address the challenges of Lean Portfolio Management:
- Is the investment portfolio aligned to business strategy?
- Are product and release plans reliable?
- Do you understand the impacts of your investments?
- Can you quickly adapt plans to accommodate strategy changes?
These key questions are answered by the following essential capabilities.
Business strategic planning
This gives Lean Portfolio Managers the tools they need to understand business strategy and priorities, and align Agile budgets. Further, business models, processes and capabilities support assessment of the impact of strategy on the business.
Business IT relationship management
This manages business demand, e.g. ideas and epics, along perspectives such as strategic themes, digital products, and business capabilities for effective funnel management. Demands are associated with impacted business and IT architecture, facilitating discovery of redundancies and consolidation before implementation.
Enterprise architecture management
Enterprise architecture management supports the enterprise architecture and product teams by giving them transparency over the IT landscape and business dependencies. Having this information at their fingertips reduces effort and increases delivery velocity, while helping to identify conflicts and potential synchronization points. Technology standardization provides implementation teams with information on the best technologies to use, reducing risk and costs.
IT planning
IT planning enables the Agile Release Trains (ARTs) to plan for transparency over the delivery of releases and features. Manage hybrid portfolios by including traditional programs and projects. This capability also supports resource and financial planning and portfolio analysis to support decision making. Synchronization points between ARTs can be defined and monitored. The feature backlog management is Kanban-enabled and synchronized with DevOps systems like Jira to support implementation governance.
Process-based, intelligent platform
Standard reports, software, and methodology are available out-of-the-box to kick-start Lean Portfolio Management. The workflow engine, event manager, and role-based access enable the necessary processes such as ART approval. Generated visualizations, scenario analysis, and AI-enabled diagnostics provide valuable portfolio insights.
Leader in SPM and EA
Internationally renowned companies across the globe use the market-leading solution for SPM and EA—Alfabet. The platform provides a set of core capabilities to sustainably manage and ensure IT’s contribution to business value. SPM and EA aim to plan and monitor the performance of IT support throughout its entire life cycle—ensuring that business strategy and demands are fully understood, prioritized and executed, and that the costs, quality and risks to IT support are known and considered during decision making.
Alfabet has been instrumental in bridging the gap between our IT and business teams, fostering a collaborative environment where we can work together to achieve our strategic objectives and maximize the value of our technology investments.
About Alfabet
Alfabet is a leading enterprise platform with standard modules that support effective Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) and EA, offering:
- The richest set of artifacts in the industry
- A single, central repository
- Role-based access and support for global communities
- Decision-ready reporting and publication
- Advanced support for the agile enterprise
- Broad and easy-to-use configuration
- Use of leading-edge AI technologies
- Support for federated enterprises
