Get Started with Adaptive Portfolio Planning

Anticipate Trends and Respond Quickly to Change

Scenarios are used within Investment and Capacity Planning to collaborate and prioritize across the enterprise, then publish final decisions once there is agreement about which investments will be completed. Within the context of adaptive portfolio planning, you can leverage scenario planning to evaluate and prioritize funding and investments for the current quarter or future quarters, as well as adapt to the changing priorities in the market or feedback from customer focus groups.  

Create multiple planning scenarios to model the impact of potential changes and make trade-offs, all without impacting work that is currently being done (any edits made to scenarios will not update the respective projects without being published.) When comparing scenarios, keep these key questions in mind to guide you in your decision-making process: 

• What are the impacts to delivering the portfolio outcome if alternative staffing or funding scenarios are used? 
• How does moving resources impact the overall cost or ROI? 

Drive Flexible Resource and Capacity Planning

Continuing to use the Investment and Capacity Planning tool will enable you to see areas of improvement needed to ensure accurate reporting and planning. One area we recommend starting with is resource management and capacity planning. First, create a Planning portfolio that uses Cost Center (CBS1) as the resource capacity and Work as demand to get a whole-organization view of resource capacity planning, and identify areas where data may need to be reviewed or corrected. This detailed view of capacity and demand data aligned to investments can help you answer the following questions:  

• Do we have the right resources and teams working on the right work? 
• Do we have skills gaps we can fill with resources from other teams? 
• Are we making decisions against accurate capacity? 

This is also an opportunity to start looking at raising resource planning from the named resource level to role-level planning, so you can accurately anticipate trends and plan for future work. Use the Balance pivot view with a focus on teams and resource roles to get a high-level overview of capacity for each sprint, and identify areas where there are critical resource capacity issues. 

Once you have identified any problem areas, use the Shift pivot view to make trade-offs and adjustments as needed (for example, extending or compressing the duration of a project to be longer or shorter, or shifting it to a future quarter in the schedule). In the example below, note that the focus control is set to Resource Roles, with the red areas indicating capacity issues. 

View Progress on Multiple Programs

As you make the shift to funding strategic programs, view progress on multiple programs at once by creating a program level board in Planview AgilePlace. You’re likely already familiar with team level boards, where teams visualize their work as it moves through various process steps. A program level board enables you to visualize all the programs being completed by cross-functional teams, capture ideas and requests, track risks and dependencies, and facilitate strategic decisions about work being done across the organization.  

Depending on what you want to track, each program level board will be set up a little differently. See the following resources for more tips on designing your program board: 

• A Look into Program-level Kanban Design 
• Top 10 Board Templates 
• Edit Your Board Layout 

Define and Measure Success with Objectives and Key Results

As they continue to prioritize programs based on measure of return, most organizations must make a cultural shift from outputs to outcomes, which requires a fundamental change in how people think about and measure the work they do. OKRs are a framework for defining and tracking key results, which helps create alignment and engagement around measurable goals. Additionally, organizations that use these leading indicators are more prepared to react to unexpected changes, as they can instantly view the status of the cards delivering on the Key Results and make strategic decisions based on accurate information. 

OKR levels can be used to define OKRs at the team, program, value stream, and enterprise level. When defining OKRs, each team should aim to set objectives at the appropriate level, and make the key results detailed and quantifiable. For more information about defining and using OKRs in Planview AgilePlace, see the following articles: 

• Understanding OKRs 
• Adding Objectives 
• Adding Key Results 

After defining your OKRs, you can capture which work items are connected to specific goals by connecting Activities to your Key Results. As you make progress on those cards, you can also report progress update information directly on your Key Results. 

Additional Resources

Below you will find links to assets from across the organization that will be useful for your self-learning and also your work to implement the Adaptive Portfolio Planning stage of the PPM Modernization Journey.