Agile Project Portfolio Management? Conclusion

This is the last article in our Agile Project Portfolio Management series. The first article explored the concept of project portfolio management and how it relates to projects that are executed with agile delivery methods. The following articles discussed demand management, categorization, evaluation, funding, alignment, authorization, and monitoring.

Whilst writing of these articles I read a lot of books and other articles about (Agile) project portfolio management. I have seen a number of different ideas and approaches and a number of Agile frameworks that touch the subject of portfolio management. For example SAFe and DAD.

The Disciplined Agile Consortium (creators of DAD) has defined a number of principles of Agile Portfolio Management where I can fully agree with.

Simplicity: Keep your approach lightweight and streamlined.

Value: Focus on value over cost.

Reduce Delay: Reduce the cost of delay [link].

Improve: Invest in streamlining the creation of value.

Stable Teams: Prefer stable teams over project teams.

Align to Value: Align teams to value streams.

Rolling Wave: Prefer rolling wave plans and budgets to annual ones [link].

Choice is Good: Support and enable diversity of approach.

Trust: Trust but verify.

Risk Driven: Govern by risk, not by artifacts.

Small is Good: Prefer small endeavors over large ones.

Quality: Invest in Quality.

Enterprise Aware: Optimize the whole.

But what I was missing was a simple blueprint that could be used as a base for implementing Agile project portfolio management. That is why I decided to write my own. This resulted in the Simple Portfolio Management Framework.

Other articles in this series

Buy The Art and Science of Technology Project Portfolio Management

Posted on Thursday, June 22, 2017 by Henrico Dolfing