Leadership

Agile Portfolio - Planning: Managing Your Project Portfolio –

Agile practices and development methodologies

  A Johanna started by thanking for the invitation and saying how happy they are to be in Brazil.

And with a question like, do you guys love working on multitasking projects?

Many may enjoy it but as you know what to do?

Which one should we do first?

And when there are interruptions?

We can’t spend all our time looking for our managers to tell us what to do.

We need and want to use our brains and participate in deciding what to do.  

Whats The Problem
Whats The Problem
  For us, it may be complicated to deal with this, but management is about multitasking, and that’s transparent for them, but development isn’t like that; we need to focus, without interruptions or if not, the loops will never end!

And multitasking layers in projects don’t stop there; they rise to portfolio levels, where desire meets reality, where February starts several projects while we have the shortest month of the year with various festivals and ski seasons.

For Johanna, it’s very interesting that we first have a division in our portfolio of what is expected and where we won’t have a team to do it and an intermediate level that involves projects with your team can make all the difference.  

What These Portfolios Are Missing
What These Portfolios Are Missing
But what is a project portfolio?

We can’t have a set of projects in a basket and think that’s the portfolio, and even less can we group them and execute such a plan as if all could be run and built at the same time!

We need to end some of them and what can’t be done should really not be attempted because we’ll swap our feet for hands, disorganizing our team.

After defining priorities, start dates, and end dates, we pass through having a portfolio?

But when can they be considered concluded or acceptably concluded?

We need to decide that, and then we’ll be closer to reality.   We need to use the portfolios created to our advantage, not changing people frenetically inside it, because if they do, they will lose their most important senses, such as “velocity” and projects can pass from predictable to chaotic; definitely not what we want.

We need to work with internal and strategic values of these concepts in our products, re-prioritizing projects and tasks until we achieve perfect organization in terms of productivity, quality, and value delivery.  

Project Portfolio Flow
Project Portfolio Flow
  But what frequency should we deal with decisions in our portfolio?

Once a year, every week?

According to Johanna, we need to adapt with points like MMF.

Something that can help us and start thinking in terms of successive questions, such as do we have enough people to test, develop, do we have money for it?

How do we expect the customer adoption curve to behave?

And mainly how this project can promote our team to a higher level!

Qualitative questions should be considered just like quantitative ones but always the former as more important.   We need to understand various types of projects, prioritize and re-prioritize functionalities and products; for Johanna, there are three types of projects: those that keep the company running, those that will strengthen and grow our companies, and those that will create excellent and great opportunities in our companies!

What type is yours in your portfolio?   Thus, if we decide which project is most important, we can help everyone understand our company, avoiding each one choosing their favorites and all feeling lost, with more progress and less imperfections.   And will agile and Lean help?

Maybe if we have in mind that people are not machines and we need not only automation but a prioritization of humanization!   It doesn’t matter how many projects you start; just count how many you finish.