Portfolio Kanban System: A Silver Bullet or Golden Hammer?

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Introduction

The title may seem like a clickbait, but is actually not. I do seriously believe that there are a few “silver bullets” to being lean. Equally, I do also believe that in the knowledge industry, a kanban system, a supposed visual way of managing the flow of value, is a modern day golden hammer for many i.e. very overrated providing a false sense of assurance of being lean.

The portfolio kanban is really the heart of an LPM practice. Creating a balanced pull-based kanban system is an art as much as its a science, more so at the portfolio level, where things are quite abstract (bunch of hypotheses rather than work). In my opinion, the practical struggle for many orgs, although the theory is well-established, is maintaining systemic coherence at this level. In the context of a large enterprise, where the experience and learnings vastly vary across different parts of the org, there is an easy trap of getting distracted or crawling back into older habits (stage-gate approach). This is a short article focussing on how to avoid this trap and evolve a leaner portfolio kanban system leveraging Jira Align to the fullest extent.

Conventional Advocacy for Portfolio Kanban

Let’s start from an obvious place. Most of the prevalent literature in the knowledge industry talks about “concept to cash”, a multi-step lean approach to faster/efficient flow of value to the end customer. Typically, this would start with what is known as an “upstream kanban”, i.e. starting with a funnel of ideas, refining them, and introducing them into the work backlog. The concept of “upstream” and “downstream” comes from the supply chain and manufacturing. Generally, the flow until the point of production or “committing to work” is regarded as upstream, while the flow after the point of commitment is considered downstream or implementation. A portfolio kanban is a specialized form of upstream kanban that connects the organizational strategy to execution, i.e. shapes the journey of goals/ideas to form strategic initiatives with a definitive benefit hypothesis, business value, and forecasted size. This allows enterprise leaders to manage the amount of work in the system, set out the right priorities, and continually evaluate the value generated based on lean principles.

The typical steps as popularized and advocated by modern ways of working are:

The Most Common Practical Challenges

There is no doubt about portfolio kanban bringing high visibility of work, connection to purpose. But many (if not most) find the practical aspects to be a bit different from the theory (see the fine print).

It is obvious that most of the above are cultural challenges. Many people perceive cultural change as difficult and slow. But a practical hack to bring about acceleration is the actionable insights that Jira Align provides (see callouts in the next section).

A Practical Perspective on Portfolio Kanban with Jira Align

The various visualizations that Jira Align supports are all based on four different dimensions of managing lean/agile change - people, work, time and outcomes. You can reimagine your portfolio flow by reframing your exit criteria (for the kanban stages) based on these dimensions, rather than merely focussing on refining work.

Here is an illustrated example:

Finishing Note

As you can see, the greater clarity generated from a simple change in the way your flow is laid out can address a number of cultural issues head on. I won’t absolutely spell out how they resolve every single challenge in my list above. But to provide some examples, you can:

• Categorize the incoming ideas in the funnel by alignment to strategy, outcomes and investment themes.

• Minimize hippo due to visibility of all 4 dimensions leading to more objective evaluation of criteria.

• Avoid putting people on the spot for estimation/forecasts, but iteratively build the confidence

• Eliminate ivory towers due to seamless connectivity to work and the ability to execute.

• Drive better pivot/persevere decisions

I’d advocate start including using these dimensions to reimagine your kanban flow to see stuff happening. So don't shy away starting your portfolio meetings (review or sync sessions) with a kanban .