Shaping Portfolio Agility

"Create the visualizations that are going to be useful, do some cleanup work to create the space for people to think a little more deeply, and then make sure you don't waste their time so they can put some wins on the board" - Eric Willeke

With our love of strategy off the leash in Episode 3, we continue down the path this episode. We explore why strategy matters so much to portfolio design. This provides a bridge to understanding how portfolios evolve and change over time, the critical characteristics to clarify early, and the questions that might emerge. It's no use having interesting questions if you have no time to wrestle with them. We conclude the episode by examining some of our favorite approaches to creating space for critical conversations.

 In this episode, we cover:

• (00:39) Episode Intro

Cast:

Eric Willeke

Mark Richards

Book References:

• Zone to Win – Geoffrey Moore

"I don't want to have a minnow next to a minotaur because the minnow is never going to feature in the conversation" - Mark Richards

This is the first episode where we deep-dive into strategy. Whether your portfolio is shaping a strategy or deploying one shaped elsewhere, you need tools to contextualize it in the overall enterprise. We take horizon-based investment and Geoffrey Moore's Zone to Win model and explore what happens when you use it as a conceptual model for your portfolio ecosystem.

Along the way, we discuss our belief that you should be able to take an overall enterprise strategy and model your portfolios as logical pieces of it. Each should have a clear purpose and context, and collectively they should add back up to the whole. Our conversation explores the implications of each of Moore's four zones and the insights and implications that emerge when you leverage them to characterize your portfolios.

In this episode, we cover:

• (00:39) Episode Intro

Cast:

Eric Willeke

Mark Richards

Book References:

• Your strategy needs a strategy – Reeves, Haanaes, Sinha

"In nearly half of the cases I can think of, the things that the teams most hate      providing to governance are the same things the governance team doesn't actually want and doesn't know how to tell the teams to stop providing" - Eric Willeke

This episode dives into the 'Lean' aspect of lean portfolio management. It begins with a brief exploration of lean and systems thinking and their focus on optimizing the whole, improving flow, and reducing waste. We then 'put our lean hats on' to explore lean’s relation to strategy, operations, and governance.

Treating these elements as a portfolio's 'jobs to be done,' we stress the importance of taking the portfolio in your line of sight and understanding its mandate for each job. We share common patterns and variations of mandates we've seen and typical ways in which lean thinking generates positive change.

In this episode, we cover:

• (00:39) Intro

Cast:

Eric Willeke

Mark Richards

"Start with  questions that paint a picture of today before you try painting a picture of tomorrow"  - Mark Richards 

In this podcast's first episode, we lay the foundations for exploring Lean Portfolio Management. We start with a high-level overview of portfolios and their uses and share our stories of first encountering them. From there, we dig into the few key definitions and elements we feel are critical to setting the stage for the show's arc before diving into the tensions, trade-offs, and recurring definitional pieces.

We stress the importance of being aware of your naturally inherent bias and the criticality of your starting stance:  seeking first to understand. The first questions we pose in pursuit of understanding relate to the nature of the portfolio, the mandate, its context in the ecosystem, and its relationship to strategy, portfolio operations, and governance.

In this episode, we cover:

• (00:00) Podcast Overview and Origins

 Cast:

Eric Willeke

Mark Richards

Show Notes

• Your strategy needs a strategy – Reeves, Haanaes, Sinha