Slides form our talk on portfolio visualisation from the Scrum Gathering Prague 2015 #SGPRG

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Portfolio Visualisation
Observations, analysis & recommendations
16 November 2015

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What is a portfolio?
A portfolio in our terms here today:
High level overview of all the projects or programs currently in progress.

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What is capacity planning?
• You look at the available capacity and find something for them to
do.
• You plan based on skills and technical or domain capabilities, in Silo’s.

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The problem
• Always a capability in high demand
• Other capabilities are idle
• This leads to parallelization
• multi-tasking individuals
• Too much work in progress
• Always urgent things to start
• But nothing seems to get finished.
• The result is local optimization.
• And global sub-optimization.

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How we try to solve this
• Hiring
• Changing teams
• More planning

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Is hiring the answer?
• It's slow!
• Permanent hires have a lead time of at least 2 months
• They need time to get up to speed
• It's expensive!
•Time invested in looking for the right people
•Time needed to get people up to speed
•Agency fees
• It's a temporary fix!
•By the time they are productive another skill is in high demand

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Moving people between teams
• Breaks team loyalty.
• Often this just shifts the
bottleneck and we are back
to not having enough
people.

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Use planning to solve this

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The Cost of Parallelization

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Sound Familiar?

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How do we shift from this capacity
focus to a value driven model?

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Step 1 - visualize the reality, identify the waste
• Visualise the current reality
• The value stream concept to
cash
• Put it on a wall, in a room, on
a board, anywhere …
• Do this with everyone who
has a part to play in this
system.
• Identify the waste

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Step 2 - Try to clean it up
• Small incremental changes
•Identify quick wins
•Run safe to fail experiments
• Set explicit policies
•For starting new work
•For finishing work
•Dealing with ad-hoc work
• Stop starting, start finishing
•Identify the most valuable (Epic/Projects/Feature)
•Challenge yourself to finish this as fast as possible

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Step 3 - Identify value, evaluate problems
• Focus on pieces of value through the value stream
• Build these and measure the success
• Kill projects, smaller chunks give flexibility and adaptability
• Measure
• Measure lead and cycle time
• Measure for information
• Identify and evaluate problems
• Get a shared common understanding of the problem we are trying to solve
• Solve real problems don’t start with solutions
• Compare value stream with skill capacities
• Understand bottlenecks and encourage learning across silos

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Step 4 - Identify strategic opportunities
• Use lean Canvas
• Link your value items to your overall strategy
• Use Lean canvas to plan on value vs emotion and capacity
• Kill your darlings!
• Make the tough choices early
• Decide on value and information not emotion
• Planning for capacity is not going to deliver the most value
• Optimize the whole
• Empower people with information to make good decisions

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Examples...
• Momentum - Short term
insurance
• Short term insurance
division of a major
insurance company in SA
• Dev team in india
• Testers and Ba’s in SA
• +- 150 people
• 5 teams and portfolio
system

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• Siemens - Motion Control Division
• Development of Hardware with Software
• 4 different locations in Germany, Additional Teams in Hungary and USA
• 7 Projects with 4 - 7 teams each
• Mix of Scrum teams and Hardware teams
• Embedded Software and Interface development

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• Company providing infrastructure and support solutions
• Project board
• Spanning teams doing networking, desktop support, hardware set up,
application installation, server set up and support for linux and windows.
• 7 teams and Project board
• about 200 people

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Joanne Perold
Agile Coach (CSM, CSPO, CSP)
joanne.perold@agile42.com
Contact details
Niels Verdonk
Agile Coach (CSM, CSPO, CSP)
niels.verdonk@agile42.com