So you have a Portfolio Kanban board managing your most significant investments. You’re actively managing the flow by using this Kanban board in your portfolio conversations. In this article, we will provide guidance on how to use Flow metrics to help you manage and improve flow.
Managing Portfolio Work in Process using WIP
Yes, we can see the current WIP just by looking at the Portfolio Kanban.
We can drive additional insights by explicitly measuring the WIP level, tracking its trend over time, and measuring it both by counting items at each stage of the workflow and by looking at the overall investment in process.
Hopefully, the insight is that we really have too many things in the process, and we should do something about it. And over time, measuring WIP will show whether what we’re doing is successful.
Focusing on Portfolio Speed using Cycle Time
Cycle Time for portfolio-level investments will be measured in months. (Not weeks, and hopefully not years…). It will also have higher variability since we’re not forcing our portfolio investments to fit a timebox. Cycle Time gives us key information about our time to learn and time to market. Over time, we can hopefully establish a Service Level Expectation (SLE) that will help us manage our expectations around investment workflow.
Understanding Your Portfolio Throughput
Throughput doesn’t care about the size of the investments. It counts investments “finished” in a unit of time. Remember – in most portfolio workflows, finished means “we’re done treating this as a high profile investment – it's now back to business as usual”.
With information about the overall throughput, we can have some interesting conversations about the funnel leading into the workflow. For example – if we learn that our throughput is 3 investments a quarter (I know multiple portfolio teams who would love to have that) – how many investments does it make sense to consider each quarter? What’s the proper shape of the consideration funnel? Where are our bottlenecks/constraints?
Identifying Slow-moving Portfolio Investments using Work Item Age
The Work Item Age metric helps us anticipate/intercept investments that aren’t meeting our expectations by showing how long a work item has been active. Even for portfolio investments with a long time horizon, Work Item Age can help identify anomalies.
Now what? Start measuring flow metrics for your Portfolio Kanban (as soon as possible, because it will take time to see meaningful data).
If you have historical data, you can try reverse-engineering flow metrics to accelerate the establishment of a baseline. This sort of data can help convince portfolio leaders and stakeholders that the portfolio is more like a swamp than a river…
Finally, a warning. It’s essential to focus on flow. And it is the right place to start. But it’s far from enough.
Make sure that you’re leveraging flow to improve outcomes.
Are you interested to learn more about how to leverage Flow and Evidence-based Management to scale an Agile Product Operating Model, moving from projects to products at the Portfolio level?
Check out this free email course that goes into more depth on why and how to do this.