Agile Portfolio Management Metrics to Guide your next Enterprise-wide Road Trip
Are you overwhelmed and/or confused as to which metrics can reveal insights to make fact-based decisions to properly manage your agile software development portfolio. Join us for a the story of a journey, where we will use the metaphor of “going on a road trip” to explain and demonstrate simple yet effective metrics for agile portfolio management. As we go on our road trip, we’ll highlight the importance of defining and then using quantitative “roll-up” metrics to enable leadership to make informed strategic decisions without slowing delivery team activities while at the same time providing a foundation for team self-management and autonomy. We’ll use the road-trip metaphor to depict the challenges that teams and organizations encounter attempting to manage their portfolio without effective portfolio metrics defined. Think about what driving on a road trip would be like if your car didn’t have a check-engine light or a gas gauge, sound risky??? The good news is: it doesn’t have to be that way, and believe it or not, if you have measurements at the team level creating actionable portfolio-metrics is easier than you think. As we recommend simple portfolio-level metrics to guide our road trip, we’ll define them, share how to interpret them, discuss the insights they provide, and offer guidance on how to gather or aggregate them from team execution data. We will also touch on why and how the use of an easy to understand metaphor has aided significantly in creating and sustaining engagement amongst stakeholders for portfolio inception and governance activities. Participants will leave having learned how to successfully navigate their next enterprise-wide initiative using quantitative data to promote alignment, maximize return on investment, foster engagement and reduce risk - everyone attending will receive a printed guide (worksheet) summarizing recommended metrics for agile portfolio management discussed.
Outline/Structure of the Talk
This is a new presentation that has emerged from some ongoing Portfolio Management coaching and is intended to share insights to overcome the challenge of creating and sustaining stakeholder engagement in portfolio inception and governance activities.
We learned that our portfolio stakeholders wanted a small collection of simple metrics, as prior attempts at portfolio management had been too complex and/or difficult to understand, which made them costly & cumbersome to baseline and then maintain. We decided to use a metaphor-based story-telling approach to educate stakeholders on a new set of simplified metrics that would allow them to gain fidelity on ROI and make informed decisions. Insights shared have been applied in an organization that operates a vehicle-based business, so the idea of using a “road-trip” story (a common activity the organization enables its customers to engage in and for which the organization very keenly measures the satisfaction of their customers) made it easy for all stakeholders to understand, and contribute to portfolio management activities.
This presentation will be similar to other conference presentations I’ve given based on a type of metrics and supportive of the theme that many agile teams/programs/portfolios are not measuring enough to enable informed decision making - without sufficient measurement, key agile principles including self-management, trust, autonomy and respect are compromised. I hypothesize that there is a strong correlation between sustaining these principles within an agile program and implementing sufficient measurement to make data informed decisions at all levels.
For this presentation, I’ll discuss the “type of metrics”, in this case Portfolio-level that are “rolled-up” from team-level metrics (some call this practice “measuring up”) - then I’ll talk through a series of useful metrics, discuss what each one means, and how to interpret it, while showing examples and also sketching data trends that reveal insights.
For this new talk, slides will be visual, as we’ll use some road-trip inspired pictures to illustrate both positive and negative trends - participants will receive a handout that lists the metrics discussed and provides insights on them (link to a draft sample included below).
Rough Timeline:
** 5 minutes - Why a different approach to Portfolio Metrics was needed?
** 5 minutes - Why we decided to use a metaphor based approach?
** 5 minutes - Why “roll-up” metrics (“measuring up”) are different from team-level metrics and why portfolio decision making needs to be guided by roll-up metrics
** 25 minutes - Portfolio Metric Lightning Talks - for each portfolio metric we’ll discuss:
---- What the metric is
---- What insights it provides (why to track it)
---- How to interpret trends (what the data means)
---- How to gather / aggregate data to generate the metric
** 5 minutes - Questions and Answers
Total Time: 45 minutes
Learning Outcome
- Participants will learn about the concept of “roll-up” metrics for agile portfolio management, and how “roll-up” metrics are based upon, but different from team-level metrics - we will also share challenges that an organization attempts to use team-level metrics for portfolio decisions.
- Participants will walk away having been exposed to 6-10 recommended metrics for agile portfolio management - in addition to the definition, we’ll share what type of insights each metric provides and discuss how to gather necessary data to compute each metric.
- Participants will learn and experience the often under-utilized power of metaphor to promote more effective learning and increased engagement - we’ll briefly discuss how metaphor promotes connecting the conscious and subconscious minds and share experiences where use of metaphor got people excited about portfolio collaboration.
Target Audience
Those interested in learning about agile portfolio management - either just starting out, or seeking insights to improve precision or metrics and/or engagement of stakeholders.
Links
- Sample/Draft worksheet highlighting Agile Portfolio Management Metrics - http://www.theagilefactor.com/pub/20150718-AgilePortfolioMetricsRoadTrip.pdf
- Past presentation at Big Apple Scrum Day (June 2015) on advanced scrum metrics - http://www.theagilefactor.com/live-from-new-york-its-30-metrics-for-agile-scrum-teams/
- Past presentation at AgileDC 2014 (October 2014) on the last responsible moment LEGO game - http://www.theagilefactor.com/pub/20141021-TheLastResponsibleMomentLegoGame-WorkshopSummary.pdf
- Presentation/Speaking sample - regular host on the “ThisAgileLife” Podcast - www.thisagilelife.com
- Personal Agile Blog - www.theagilefactor.com
schedule Submitted 8 years ago
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As you might have surmised, this is not a real session proposal.
As Program Chair for Agile DC 2015, I'd like to welcome you to our session submission system. If you have any questions about the submission process, please direct them to me at [email protected] and I'll respond as quickly as I can.
Please note that most sessions will be 45 minutes. We have LIMITED space for dual-length workshops.