Product Portfolio and Pipeline Planning
Product Portfolio and Pipeline Planning
The Product Portfolio and Pipeline Planning capability’s enablers include Business Requests, Product Planning and Pipeline Intake, and Gated Process Automation (Stage-Gate). 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 Outcomes
Business Requests
Supports a clearly defined process to initiate business requests, including collecting relevant categorization and scoring information and initial financial data. Resulting business outcomes include:
- We have a single repository to collect requests from the business and this repository is available to all stakeholders in the organization for review.
- We have a structured process to categorize, assess, and carry out a sizing estimation of requests before taking them forward for consideration.
- We have a controlled and consistent process for reviewing and approving all work requests.
- We can ensure that request approval and review actions have been assigned to the appropriate users based on specific criteria.
- We can ensure all appropriate actions and steps have been taken before requests are approved to progress.
Product Planning and Pipeline Intake
Supports the creation, business case development, planning, and approval of the organization’s products. Resulting business outcomes include:
- We can define, describe, and categorize the products required by our organization to realize our strategic plan.
- We can monitor product delivery by comparing it to the baseline and taking actions to bring delivery back on track.
- We can define how products will be delivered through programs and projects that create, enhance, support, and terminate them.
Gated Process Automation (Stage-Gate)
Supports automation of a repeatable gated process and governance framework within which products and their associated programs and projects are delivered. It ensures that stage-gate decisions are made by the right people, based on structured and complete data. Resulting business outcomes include:
- We can ensure that the appropriate gated process is applied to products, programs, and projects, based on specific criteria.
- We can ensure that the approval and review actions have been assigned to the appropriate user, based on specific criteria.
- We can drive improved delivery of investments by ensuring detailed information has been completed before a project proceeds to the next stage or phase in the delivery process.
- We can update existing processes based on feedback to increase efficiency and deliver products faster.
Best Practices
Work from a central intake
Aggregate work for evaluation and prioritization by determining your work intake process. Working from a centralized intake process enables you to prioritize and plan a portfolio you can deliver based on capacity. Route requests through the system and re-prioritize frequently.
Direct the work intake process
Let the process do the heavy lifting. Use gates as needed to organize the flow, collection, and evaluation of information, matching approval gates to the decision points of your business process. This includes gathering the supporting data and evaluations in a logical way to streamline the process. Then sunset unnecessary business requests as soon as possible, defer or place low-value requests on hold, and advance high value requests quickly.
Access to data is key
Data is the foundation for decision-making for every organization. Harnessing timely and accurate data across the organization is key to driving strategic innovation decisions.
Always consider scope
Scoping is setting high-level estimates for the effort, time, and types of resources required to complete a business request. Keeping scope in mind throughout the planning process will lead to greater success through the request process.
Simplify the request process
Provide your organization with the freedom to submit work ideas and requests without suffering from intake overload. Start simple to improve the likelihood for early success and incrementally increase adoption over time. Then design a straightforward request form with the requester and approver in mind. Do this by creating a standardized form for requests, ensure that everyone has access to it, and keep all requests in one place so they are easier to manage in the evaluation phase.
Standardize request evaluations
Prioritizing requests is a difficult process, but it can be made significantly more efficient by creating an objective, concise set of criteria used to rank and evaluate the requests. This will alleviate the burden of having to choose by taking away most of the guesswork and create less tension from requests that are not approved.
Continuously improve the request process
Continuously trying to improve your request process is the key to sustainable success. Highlight your successes, improve, and evolve as the needs of your organization change. Organizations that follow repeatable, measurable processes are better able to make powerful trade-off decisions, identify potential roadblocks that threaten key milestones, and execute their strategy adeptly.
Optimize your review process
Once requests have been evaluated, it is equally important to have a process in place to approve, deny, or send the request to the backlog. It’s best to have one person in charge of overseeing this process, and to make a simple, straightforward process for what happens in each case.
Categorize requests
To help guide categorization, analyze request details and scores to identify which requests are the most feasible and valuable for your organization. Do this by assessing and categorizing demand based on its overall organizational benefit, either by a simple calculated score of key data or a scoring model to represent business metrics. At the end, or as part of the request workflow process, relevant gate approvers and stakeholders can score on quantitative factors such as ROI, or on qualitative ones such as strategic fit, impact, or risk.
Processes and Reports
Product portfolio and pipeline planning supports a clearly defined process to initiate business requests, as well as collect relevant categorization and scoring information and initial financial data for products. A consistent intake process is created for new products by ensuring the appropriate gated process is applied to products, enabling accurate review and approval actions on these requests at each decision stage.
Business Requests Process Steps
Business requests process flow
| Process Step | Description |
|---|---|
| Create new request |
Create new request entities, or ideas for potential work that are entered into Planview Portfolios.
|
| Describe and categorize request |
During the initiation of a request, information is populated to describe and categorize the request. Often a minimum level of required categorization or descriptive information is enforced during the request creation lifecycle based on the information needs of the organization. |
| Review and approve |
Once you have a request portfolio, you can see detailed information regarding the requests that are included in your portfolio on the Portfolio Manager tile within the Request Portfolio View screen. This will allow the request to be reviewed in preparation for dispatch. For more information: |
|
Dispatch/associate request to project, program, or outcome/product |
The purpose of this step is to connect the request with a relevant entity in Planview Portfolios. This can be achieved by either dispatching the request which generates a new entity or associating it with an already existing one.
For more information: |
| Close request |
If approval is not granted or the request is no longer needed, change the status to closed. This provides a record of its status for reporting and ensures that no further updates can be made to the request. Depending on the internal business process, the process to close the request can vary and may contain approval gates in a lifecycle workflow. In these instances, successful completion of the lifecycle steps by the relevant users will automatically close the Request. The status of the request can be changed in the Request Detail screen, or directly in the Portfolio Manager using an appropriate column set selection. For more information: |
Product Planning and Pipeline Intake Process Steps
Product planning process flow
Gated Process Automation Process Steps
Gated process automation (stage-gate) process flow
| Process Step | Description |
|---|---|
|
Update/record status of deliverables |
Prior to going through a gate, project or program managers should ensure that the status of all relevant deliverables are updated. |
|
Complete gate assessment |
Project or program managers complete the gate assessment form – this is often in the form of a configured screen, and includes the population of checklist items and fields related to the specific gate. |
|
Submit for gate approval |
The project or program manager submits the gate assessment for approval. |
|
Gate |
This step represents the gate decision point. Gate approvers review the gate assessment and status information then decide on whether to proceed with the project/program. |
|
Record gate decision (approve) |
If the gate request is approved, the decision is recorded and the project or program proceeds to the next stage. |
|
Record gate decision (reject) |
If the gate request is rejected, the decision and reason is recorded, then the project/program returns to the original gate for update/resubmission or moves into the closure process. |
|
Close project/program |
Change the project or program status to completed. |
Related Capabilities
Financial Planning
This capability supports the planning and management of financial plan information connected to products, programs, and projects, including the creation of high-level estimates as well as approved and baseline budgets.
Read moreResource Management
This capability provides a single repository of resource availability information to an organization. Managers can track and manage assignments of named resources to forecast future demand. Time reporting information is also collected.
Read moreWork Management
This capability provides managers the ability to develop a work plan, view and manage all work details, define and classify risks, issues, and change requests, track and manage project delivery, and provide reports on the overall status and health of projects.
Read more
Supported Solutions