Learning

Focus on understanding what learning can come out of the next quarter, and steer conversations with downstream stakeholders to close a short loop.

Plan Next Quarter

As a portfolio manager, your decisions flow downstream (but up-level) to the business-level funding leaders. The recipients of the investments, are the product leaders, program leaders, or project leaders that are enabled by your decisions, indirectly. They will be funded by their parent contexts (usually the business context) via the decisions around investment made here. Once allocated, portfolio leaders support business leaders by creating and managing systems that track how the investments are being used to fund Teams, fuel Plans, and drive the Work needed to yield new outputs. Constraints on the amount of work planned can be placed via the concept of managed bets. Remember that these choices of “which teams”, “which work”, and “what plans” are not made by the portfolio leader, but by the recipient teams themselves. The role of the portfolio leader is to create systems that maintain transparency around these choices. These systems show the connection from strategy to execution, through the investments of the portfolio.

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Try this:

As portfolio leader, it is your responsibility to establish systems that provide you (and your business stakeholders) with visibility into the plans, completed work, and spend-to-date across the teams. Work with your product and program leaders to create the needed transparency into work plans. Work with your financial tracking functional context to receive the needed spend-tracking reports (as received value from their peer context).

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Decision Architecture tip:

Once the plans are visible, facilitate a Pre-Mortem with product, program, and project leaders to surface the known risks to the goals being pursued by the initiatives.

Pre-Mortem

Evaluate potential risks and possibilities of negative outcomes by evaluating a decision from the perspective

Learn more ->

Feedback Loops

Product and program plans should reference ceremonies where portfolio and business leaders can go and see Outputs and assess whether desired Outcomes were met. These assessments yield the shared Insights on outcomes, between the portfolio leader and product or program leaders. The insights provide the feedback needed to check whether any Delivered Value was truly/actually realized, as previously speculated in the Hypotheses.

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Try this:

As portfolio leader, it is your responsibility to build systems that provide you (and your business stakeholders) with feedback on your investments, by assessing the delivered outcomes (from team outputs). Sponsor, facilitate, or host ceremonies where the outcomes can be assessed and weighed against hypotheses and goals. Use these ceremonies to create tension to pivot or persevere on specific initiatives, and to continuously rationalize the overall portfolio of investments (change initiatives).

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Learning

Plan Next Quarter

Pre-Mortem

Feedback Loops

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