As a portfolio manager, maybe an essential part of your role is to receive feedback, develop tools to provide the information to all stakeholders execute a specific process to prioritize the Product Increment to the enterprise level.
After some inner thoughts, I realized that on many occasions, the Sr Management had some difficulty making decisions, many of them without knowing all the factors that impact business or others that had a dependency on IT. As Portfolio managers, we should be able to provide this data in a brief resume for any initiative. Then, when we build a portfolio is a must to gather some information in a document or Initiative format to prioritize the project or product backlog.
So when your company starts to build the portfolio should have a level of certainty to have tools for decision-making. That's why some methodologies propose an Enterprise Architect role or team of Strategic Architects to analyze all the portfolio initiatives providing coherence between the initiatives to help decision-making.
In my experience, there are so many technics that help you to do the proper scope document, but my recipe contains the following data;
Business Outcome to deliver, Economics proposal(business value), Market fit (justification), Dependency between portfolio initiatives, and High-level effort estimate.
The Prioritization should be an enterprise exercise; multi-disciplinary and must be with all team leaders to work between dependencies.
Product Increment Planning is necessary but depends on the quality of inputs that you provide for this exercise.
The decision-makers must have all the information, and that's when Agile becomes a kind of misunderstanding with the traditional waterfall method; because of this, you will try to have the best business cases for the initiatives, a best deep understanding of the business outcome to deploy and robust tech architect analysis this might sound as a waterfall and generate a false expectative because new initiatives may change the roadmap iteration. Still; then you must add to the formula a mindset of "open to change" this will help you understand why you shouldn't do this exercise of big planning rooms.
Remember to have the most relevant information about your product portfolio initiatives will give you to have certainty about the future and will provide essential data to make forecast and budget adjustments; with this in mind, the managers will need to learn that all this synchronization work doesn't happen from one day to another, and it depends on how these strategies will work together, and how the weekly communication works maintain the product on track.
I recommend having a value proposition exercise for all the initiatives and Business Model Canvas to have a compass. Those tools will help you to prioritize your product and project planning within the strategic boundaries.
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