It is common for organizations that are in the midst of an agile transformation to struggle with trying to reconcile their existing way of doing portfolio management with the ‘new’ way of agile delivery and reporting from the teams. Most still track them separately which creates a disconnect, resulting in misleading information and additional effort to try to get an accurate representation of delivery predictability. Join us as we discuss and explore ways of implementing and tracking agile portfolios that aligns the delivery from the agile teams up to the portfolio level.

1. Instructor: Eric Aiyathurai
4100 E. Third Ave, Suite 205, Foster City, CA 94404 | 650-931-1651 | www.cprime.com
The leader in training and consulting for project management and agile development
Agile Portfolio Management

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What is a Portfolio?
• Definition
• A collection of projects or programs and other work that are grouped
together to facilitate effective management of that work to meet
strategic business objectives. - PMI
• Typically contains a mix of strategic and tactical initiatives, growth-
driven and cost-driven initiatives, and customer and internally-focused
projects.
• Why do PPM?
• PPM (Project Portfolio Management): a formal approach that an
organization can use to orchestrate, prioritize and benefit from
projects. This approach examines the risk-reward of each project, the
available funds, the likelihood of a project's duration, and the expected
outcomes.

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Portfolio-Program-Project Visual Hierarchy

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Survey question
• How is the portfolio/ project status tracked in your company?
• Percent complete
• Remaining effort
• Sprints remaining
• Earned Value
• Other

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Reasons for misalignment
• Projects still treated as…projects
• Long term planning horizons (1-3yrs)
• Different tools used for PPM vs Agile teams: Don’t integrate
• Unclear how to translate sprints to time and dollars
• Traditional PM uses different metrics and terminology than
Agile/ Scrum
https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/technology/articles/agile-and-ppm.html

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Survey question
• What are the main reasons for misalignment in your org?
• Unsure how to map sprint story points to (portfolio) time estimates
• PPM tool does not integrate with Agile tool
• Execs/ Portfolio Managers do not understand the concepts of
Agile/ Agile Portfolio Management
• Other

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Key Areas of Alignment
• Definition and classification of the larger deliverables
• Traditional: Projects  WBS (Tasks)  project completion
• Agile: Value Streams  Epics  Value delivered
• Reduction of long planning cycles into shorter ones
• 3-month/ quarterly
• Switch to non-time based estimates at the portfolio level
• Commits given by high priority items vs kitchen sink requirements
• Adjustment of Portfolio deliverables based on Epic deliveries
• Portfolio level meetings should occur more frequently (every 2
weeks)
• Initial allocation of staff done for the most important set of
Initiatives/ Epics
• Stable delivery teams
• Limit WIP

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Cone of uncertainty – with an Agile context

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Shift from Project to Epic delivery
• Map traditional Projects/ Initiatives to the Feature – Epic level
• Make Epics the common artifact for reporting and tracking up
and down
 “Epics are large cross-cutting initiatives that deliver solutions to the end
user. As more teams adopt agile across the organization, the need to
define value-streams and epics is critical, to ensure coordinated planning
and delivery.”
• Use Epic burndowns to track progress and changes
• Use the built in reporting from Agile tools which have Epic
burndown capability

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Mapping the Portfolio to Epics
From: Avisi
Note: Depending on your Agile framework/tool, Epic and Feature could be switched around.

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Change how Portfolio Estimations are Done
• Advisable not to use time estimates at the Portfolio level
• People tend to think of them as due dates (and time commits)
• Can be used if only for planning
• Story points, T-shirt sizing, story sizing, ‘fudge factors’, etc
• These estimates get plugged in at the portfolio level
• Delivery timeframes are decided by the respective velocities
• If none, then rough guesses can be used but gets refined as team
gathers velocity data

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Cone of uncertainty in Agile estimating

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Prioritize and Track and update the Epics
• Prioritize Epics with stakeholders
• Track progress and changes using Epic burndowns
• Done at both Portfolio level and team level
• As Epics get progressively elaborated and estimated, update
portfolio estimates accordingly (as applicable)

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Steps for alignment of Portfolio-Sprints
• Reframe how initiatives/ projects are to be prioritized, funded,
and delivered
• Not by fixed scope but by Epics
• Delivering the highest value items first.
• Incremental delivery
• Break up the initial project scope into Epics
• Prioritize the Epics
• Estimate the Epics
• Progressive elaborate the Epics
• Re-estimate the Epics based on the above
• Adjust either the features delivered or delivery timeframe as
needed
• Use Portfolio tools to track at the higher level (if possible,
extract numbers directly from the Agile tool used by the teams)