Portfolio Kanban – Solving CIO’s dilemma

All organizations, products and services need to manage competing priorities and requirements. Organization’s success depends upon how the utilization of available resources in terms of people, time, money are maximized. So it is a dilemma for CIOs on where to invest the available funding to get maximum return and enable business. Portfolio Kanban helps to visualize the priorities, create collaboration among business units, understand each other’s priorities, take collective decisions, create continuous end to end value creation. Portfolio Kanban enables value stream based budgeting which helps organizations to deliver value to customer continuously. Traditional budgeting and traditional earned value management and project cost management conflicts with the drive for agility at business level. By establishing portfolio of value stream, using practices that fund and empower value streams rather than projects gives results faster. We need to consider total cost of ownership of a service rather than delivering the project. Value of building a product or service depends upon the overall ROI from the service and not from the cost of project alone. Value stream represents the sequence of activities required to build and deliver a goods or service to the customer. Value steam takes into account material and information flow. The Portfolio Kanban is used to visualize, manage, and analyze the prioritization and flow of portfolio cards. Portfolio Kanban helps to move EPIC cards from ideation funnel to prioritization to implementation and completion. Portfolio Kanban helps to make the most significant business initiative visible with the potential NPV information, helps to create a common understanding and same language and consultation among business units for prioritization, reveals all required functions and business units involved/impacted to get the value flow happen, decision making becomes more economy focused than subjective. The demand funnel for a software product will include strategic decisions, competitive products and their features, customer asks, government regulations, new indigenous product features, customer feedback etc. The proposed model explains how a portfolio Kanban can be implemented and applied to a product being developed/in service. The demand funnel for an IT team will include the desired service level to be maintained, service level agreements, user experience initiatives, infrastructure cost, software service provisioning etc. Proposed model explains how standard services like software provisioning and maintenance can be brought into a portfolio Kanban and optimize the delivery in an agile delivery environment.

 

Key takeaways:

  • Need of Value Stream based funding in business
  • What is portfolio kanban
  • How Portfolio kanban helps for value stream based funding
  • Example demand funnel and priorization model for a software product with multiple competing priorities
  • Example demand funnel management for an enterprise IT team doing scaled agile delivery