Portfolio Planning
Portfolio Planning
The Portfolio Planning capability’s enablers include Intake and Lean Business Case Development, and Portfolio Backlog Management. Each capability within the Planview Capability Framework has a distinct set of features and functionality, business processes, best practices, and analytics and reports that deliver value to customers in the form of specific business outcomes.
Enablers and Business Value
Intake and Lean Business Case Development
Supports the creation, initial planning, and lean business case development of epics that will deliver and operate our products, services, systems, and their corresponding business outcomes. Resulting business outcomes include:
- We can initiate new agile work to deliver solutions defined in the value streams and achieve portfolio outcomes.
- We can collect the relevant descriptive and categorization information required to develop each agile work lean business case.
Portfolio Backlog Management
Supports portfolio backlog management, visualizing all work on a portfolio Kanban board aligned to a preferred work methodology and process. Resulting business outcomes include:
- We can visualize all approved epics on a portfolio Kanban board.
- We can customize Kanban boards to reflect existing portfolio processes.
- We can sequence epics by size, value, and team capacity or velocity considerations.
- We can create aligned autonomy by associating work on team and program boards to the portfolio Kanban board.
Best Practices
Rely on roadmaps
Use roadmapping to connect strategy, investments, projects, and resources to ensure your organization is on track with its key deliverables. This allows you to coordinate across schedules, milestones, releases, and financials of each outcome with key information about associated programs and epics while managing work dependencies.
Use an OKR framework
Using an objectives and key results (OKRs) framework can help you stay focused on the outcomes and benefits of an epic. At every level of an organization, objectives name what teams want to accomplish and key results name how teams will measure success. The relevance for PMOs is an outcome-based approach and ability to accurately measure value.
Give teams just enough governance
Empower teams to make choices about how they will deliver work in alignment with epics and encourage autonomy and collaboration. This adaptive governance model pays off with greater efficiency and enables PMOs to focus on getting their teams what they need and giving guidance on key decisions.
Shift to continuous or quarterly planning
Adapt to ongoing change by adopting a continuous planning model. Working according to short-term programs and epics enables an organization to gather, review, and incorporate customer feedback quickly while delivering value.
Centralize your data
Demonstrating your epic’s value and expected benefits to key stakeholders requires having the right high-level view of information and figuring out how you will measure progress. It’s crucial to have your supporting data in one place to derive the analytics, make informed decisions, and find any unforeseen risks with the ability to adapt.
Visualize your work dependencies
Use parent and child card features to visualize work dependencies across a team’s board and across the epic. This allows you to effectively view how everyone’s work connects with each other and fits into the larger project plan.
Involve your team in planning
Take a bottom-up approach to project planning, meaning your team members can help decide on tasks and assignments, estimate deadlines, and aid in other aspects of the team plan. This helps engage your team and get their buy-in from the beginning on how their work will be carried out.
Processes and Reports
The portfolio planning capability allows you to manage your portfolio of existing and backlogged agile epics from intake and creation to planning and development. Agile work is created, described, and prioritized in Planview Portfolios as a lean business case, then key prioritized work is synced to AgilePlace and visualized on a portfolio Kanban board. Portfolio epics are sequenced into timeboxed sprints, then broken down further into features and stories to be delivered by teams. As work progresses, portfolio investment data is updated and used to inform investment decision-making in the next iterative planning period.
Intake and Lean Business Case Process Steps
Intake and lean business case process flow
| Process Step | Description |
|---|---|
|
Create agile work |
Create a record of the new agile work in Planview Portfolios. Agile work is created at the PPL level of the work structure. |
|
Describe and categorize agile work |
Populate configuration-specific description and categorization attributes into the new agile work as determined by the data and information needs of the organization. |
|
Capture prioritization information |
Capture prioritization information either within fields or directly on the financial plan. |
|
Capture additional business case information |
Capture financial information on the agile work or directly on the financial plan. Other types of governance information may include sizing, priority, or other aspects of a lean business case. |
Portfolio Backlog Management Process Steps
Portfolio backlog management process flow
| Process Step | Description |
|---|---|
| Key prioritized work |
The output from the prioritization event will be the key prioritized work, sequenced into sprints within the Program Increment (PI). Publishing these may trigger steps within a lifecycle. |
| Sync agile work to Portfolio Board |
The sync process is often completed as part of a lifecycle. The following diagram shows the data sync at different steps in the process. The blue boxes show the sync of agile work at the PPL level of Planview Portfolios to a Planview AgilePlace Portfolio Board.
Planview Portfolios – Planview AgilePlace connector example
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Sequence agile work into appropriate timeboxes (e.g., Program Increment) |
Sync key prioritized work into AgilePlace, and make any adjustments if necessary. Even if epics were sequenced as part of investment and capacity planning, they will need to be put into the correct sprint in AgilePlace. |
|
Deliver agile work through underlying features and stories |
Build out the appropriate features and stories on the program and team program boards. Move work toward completion as underlying work is accomplished. As the organization goes through the cyclical process of delivering agile work through the underlying features and stories, the leading and lagging indicators will collect data. Based on the work's performance against projected delivery forecasts, persevere or pivot decisions will need to be made. Making these decisions each quarter instead of each year as part of annual planning increases agility at the enterprise level. This cyclical process will roll data back into the next PI Planning when investments are re-analyzed. |
