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Portfolio Management

What is it?

Portfolio Management is a group of capabilities that focuses on a Portfolio of Products, Pipeline, and Path to Production for an organization and typically owned by a Portfolio Leadership team. Portfolio Management works best in conjunction with Practice Management where Practice Management capabilities focus on People and Promotion of Practices in the organization. Phrased differently, Portfolio Management focuses on the “what” and “why” of the software that is built. Practice Management focuses on the craft, or, the “how” and “why” to the approach of building software.

Portfolio Management focuses on servicing the needs of the customer for an organization. Portfolio Leads ensure teams are working together to solve customer problems and deliver meaningful outcomes at scale.

Portfolio Management (and Practice Management) should be thought of as groupings of capabilities which must be custom-tailored to the exact needs of an organization so that when creating roles to focus on capabilities, they are shaped in a way that integrates into existing leadership functions and addresses the biggest organizational bottlenecks.

Typically a Portfolio Leadership team is a small balanced team that oversees a grouping of product teams that while working together can solve problems at a larger scale than individual product teams (a portfolio of products). The Portfolio Leadership team should have a balanced mixture of disciplines represented that mirror the teams in the delivery organization such as Design, Product Management and Engineering. Portfolio Leads align together on strategies and initiatives but then may break off to work with their own craft when it comes to discipline-specific activities.

Portfolio of Products & Services Focused Capabilities

The goal behind these capabilities is to create an environment where teams are empowered to deliver value quickly, efficiently, and iteratively aligned to organizational needs.

  • Craft a shared vision for the portfolio, a strategy to achieve the vision and how the products and services contribute to its achievement
    • Facilitate vision and strategy workshops
    • Develop a Portfolio roadmap
    • Detail how products and services fit together with a service blueprint
    • Define Portfolio architecture and integration strategies
    • Establish a Portfolio Design System
    • Create cascading goals & outcomes
    • Develop budgeting and funding strategies
    • Coordinate research operations across teams
  • Help teams set & track the appropriate metrics for product, teams, and business
    • Coach teams on metrics and collection implementation
    • Define key metrics for the portfolio
  • Keep ongoing alignment and transparency by facilitating and promoting frequent and quality team\<>stakeholder communication
    • Establish growth boards
    • Run demos and presentations showing the impact of the work
    • Facilitate sponsor check-ins
  • Foster innovation within the teams so the portfolio can grow and respond to change
    • Continuously revisit staffing needs
    • Implement mechanisms to allow for crosspollination across teams
  • Improve team delivery performance working with teams to assess & coach
    • Direct coaching and mentoring on delivery teams
    • Conduct team delivery health checks
    • Track cross-team progress and dependencies

Path to Production Focused Capabilities

The goal behind path-to-production focused capabilities is to ensure rapid delivery to production by optimizing the feedback loop between and improving collaboration amongst product and platform teams.

  • Ensure product teams can continuously deliver value by ensuring they have access to platform, automated CI/CD tooling, and a clear path to production
    • Provide developer-friendly access to CI/CD tooling
  • Raise and advocate teams’ platform requests to the appropriate ops teams
    • Prioritize and align Platform \<> Portfolio roadmaps
    • Build collaborative relationships between platform and development teams
    • Ensure feedback flows to connect development team experience to platform processes
  • Ensure teams can easily support their applications through access to production support and tooling
    • Establish consistent pre-production and production environments
    • Create self-service observability tools that enable teams to identify and debug software issues

Pipeline Focused Capabilities

Pipeline capabilities focus on opportunity intake so that product initiatives are prepped to the best state of readiness prior to kickoff.

  • Identify the right product initiatives and gain stakeholder alignment on goals, success criteria, and scope
    • Define project intake process
    • Establish criteria for good project “fit”
    • Run pre-scoping and scoping workshops
    • Craft proposals for new projects
    • Align project intake to timing and funding strategies
  • Ensure initiatives focus on delivering business value to reduce waste
    • Conduct build vs buy analysis
    • Maintain a prioritized opportunity backlog
  • Allocate talent and teams to the appropriate initiatives to maximize their impact while balancing growth opportunities
    • Manage project allocations
  • Facilitate and train others on key product kickoff and alignment ceremonies
    • Facilitate new project kickoffs
    • Facilitate re-inceptions during large project pivots

Why do it?

In order to solve problems at an enterprise scale, teams must work together in order to tackle the greater complexity. Autonomous, agile product teams strike a balance between exploitation (how to further make improvements to known strategies to maximize rewards) and exploration (trying new actions or strategies which have uncertainty). When solving smaller scale problems, this autonomy allows teams to function with great efficiency. When solving larger, more complex problems that involve multiple teams, a Portfolio function helps coordinate efforts to get all teams “rowing in the same direction.” The Portfolio team strikes a delicate balance that allows for autonomy at the product team level while keeping teams aligned around the larger outcomes. By setting up mechanisms for teams to collaborate and integrate, an organization can tackle larger, more complex problems than they would be able to without a Portfolio management function.

Portfolio Management Key Results

Speed

  • Improved ability to respond to feedback
  • Reduced time to deliver features
  • Increased frequency of product deployments
  • Reduced time to deliver outcomes

Stability

  • Decreased team volatility
  • Decrease in product defects and failures

Security

  • Improved psychological safety

Scalability

  • Expansion of practitioner capabilities
  • Improved coaching capabilities
  • Improved speed to onboard
  • More easily scalable software architectures (cloud native)
  • Better customer fit

Savings

  • Improved return on investment
  • Less product waste
  • Greater automation

Practice & Portfolio Management in Tandem

Practice & Portfolio Leadership teams work closely together to deliver outcomes.

Portfolio Leads focus on servicing the needs of the customer through delivery of outcomes. They ensure teams are moving in the right direction together.

Practice Leads focus on servicing the needs of all practitioners and cultivating healthy communities of practice. They develop practitioners to have the skill sets needed to be successful on projects.

Practice & Portfolio roles create a clear division of capabilities when both exist in an organization. If one role exists without the other, the capabilities become more homogeneous across Practice & Portfolio. Responsibilities and focus should reflect the current needs of the organization.

Internal Portfolio Management & Customer-Facing Portfolio Management as a Service

At the moment, Rise8 does not have any internal-focused Portfolio Leads but as Rise8’s own software portfolio grows beyond Tracer, there will be opportunities to think more holistically about the Rise8 software portfolio. For the time being, Portfolio Leadership has been a customer-facing service offering at Rise8 but could also become an internal capability in the future.