Portfolio Kanban

Leaders take note: Portfolio Kanban creates clear links between the work and the business goals, builds collaboration across teams, and improves communication across the organisation or division. Done well, it will catapult your delivery capability in a way nothing else can.

Don’t be fooled by its simplicity. Portfolio Kanban or ‘portfolio management’ is an extremely effective tool. In terms of my model, it significantly boosts all three delivery markers: strategic alignment, continuous improvement, and informed decision-making. And in my experience of ‘agile transformations’ it provides 80% of the benefit while accounting for 20% of the effort. Basically, if you haven’t got something like this in place already, make it your priority.

Establishing a portfolio layer improves communication and alignment across the organisation (or department), and enables continuous and sustainable improvements led by the team.

At its core, Portfolio Kanban is a visual representation of your work. It consists of a board showing high-level work initiatives that move from left to right through each stage of the workflow. The workflow is based on what happens in your organisation – and will evolve as you learn. The initiatives can be anything as long as they’re:
a) more detailed than the strategic goals (but linked to them) and
b) less detailed than the day-to-day tasks.

It could look something like this…

Simplified kanban board example visualising the link between the work, the teams, and the business goals. — Portfolio Kanban board: There are many variations on the format – what’s important is seeing the link between the teams, the work, and the strategic goals.

Do this if you’re experiencing…

The perception that work is not aligned to the strategy and budgets
Teams reporting a lack of clarity with priorities
Poor visibility of project progress
Delivery not being joined up across other functions (Comms, Ops, Sales, Customer Service)
Delays due to dependencies and conflicting priorities across teams
Excessive deferral to leadership, with multiple disparate conversations.

Do this if you want to…

Align your resources to your business priorities
Join up delivery across teams and other functions
Allow your teams to prioritise effectively
Enable delivery expertise to improve continuously
Give your people the input they want and need
Get the input you want and need from your people.

It’s all in the portfolio layer

Essentially, what we’re doing here is establishing a middle ‘portfolio’ layer between the Exec and the Teams (and different functions). Not to prevent communication, but to improve it. Not to create more silos, but to open them up. This works when you have only a few teams, and it scales up just as easily if you multiple functions each with multiple teams. And it most definitely is not restricted to digital-based organisations – and works just as well in the service sector and with charities and non-profits.

Image showing how communication can happen across teams and the leadership when it evolves in an unplanned or unstructured way, versus the simpler and more effective communication framework offered by portfolio kanban methods. — When teams grow, the additional layer at the portfolio level makes communication simpler and more effective between teams and leadership, and across teams and leadership.

See my Delivery Health model to learn more about the responsibilities of the Portfolio layer along with the tools and activities commonly used, and some of the issues you might be experiencing without it.

How to get going

There is a world of information out there about Portfolio Kanban. Doing it well requires effort, skill, and patience. But what’s most important, however, is that you make a start and choose progress over perfection. Have a look at the following steps (and get the books later).

1. Create the board

Make a list of the work initiatives you know of (keep it high-level). Create a Kanban board using whatever project tracking software is most commonly used in your organisation (otherwise something like Trello or Asana). Add columns that reflect the basic high-level steps of your project. Then add the work to the board, in whatever stage they are in (you’ll need input to get it right, but you can also use the first meeting to invite clarifications.
The workflow can evolve over time. When it’s time to go deeper and get the wider team involved, I recommend Draw Toast as a format for the session.

2. Set up the Review meeting

The Review meeting (other names are available) is where it all comes together, so set up a session and invite at least one representative from each team that has work on the board. At the meeting, show the board and ask each representative for a short (30-second) update on their work, plus any challenges and requests for support. Invite comments and suggest follow-up conversations where necessary. You can also use this session to move work to the right workflow stage and get early feedback on the workflow columns (now could be a good time to schedule that Draw Toast session)
Before the next session, ask each representative to
– label their work according to the strategic outcomes and metrics it supports
– Suggest other participants for this session.

3. Schedule regular retrospectives

It’s hard to overstate the value of regular retrospectives. Retrospectives are meetings where the focus is purely on how we work together – they enable continuous improvement, and provide permission to focus on the process of doing the work (not just doing the work). They might well be something delivery teams are already doing in your organisation, but portfolio-level retrospectives examine how you work across teams. The suggestions and experiments from this session must be actioned and followed up, and essentially become part of the work. Done well, not only are they effective at driving improvements, they are also hugely empowering events where leaders demonstrate their commitment to listening and acting on the input from others. You’re creating a culture of delivery.

4. Start measuring

Now you can see how work flows through the organisation, you can measure how fast it flows. Most digital project trackers have reporting tools too, and if not look for plug-ins. Cycle time and lead time are ultimately what matters, along with visibility of how long work takes at each stage (made visible through Cumulative Flow Diagrams). If you aren’t already measuring output it’s not worth going into too much detail about what you measure. Even just seeing how many things get completed – albeit they will be different-sized and have different value – puts you in pole position for delivery greatness. And as long as you have retrospectives in place, you will continually find ways to experiment and improve.
Note: These metrics measure delivery capacity – how efficient you are as an organisation at delivering work. They are in addition to reporting on strategic goals that are achieved through doing the work.

5. Refine your workflow

Now your workflow has been articulated you can start establishing what needs to happen at each stage. You can define this in terms of entry or exit criteria for each stage (sometimes also called ‘definitions of ready’). A key requirement at early stages of the workflow will be the articulation of the value that the work creates, including how that value will be measured, and a link to the strategic goal it contributes to.
As each project or deliverable progresses, you gain knowledge with which to continually improve the process – adding or removing stages, renaming them, and refining the exit criteria. In so doing you are optimising the flow of value through your organisation, and the quality of the work. It can be an absolute game-changer.
Note: I’m talking about creating the ‘right amount’ of process to ensure the work is of sufficient quality. As with all governance, it’s about balance. Your mission and the value you create have to be at the heart of any process conversation.

The benefits you can expect

In return for those pretty simple steps outlined above you will be able to see, prioritise, and coordinate the work happening across your organisation. These are some of the benefits you can expect.

Teams become aligned to the strategy, simply by mapping the work to your strategic goals.
You can see what you’re investing in or where you are spending your budget (whether you have a current strategy or not).
You can prioritise more effectively – including stopping work because there’s too much in progress.
Over time, your people can be more effectively aligned to the work that matters, rather than work being given to keep teams busy.
You are continuously improving the process of doing the work through regular retrospectives.
Decision-making becomes more informed.
Delivery is joined up across the organisation. Fewer silos, fewer communication gaps.
Greater clarity and consistency of the work process.
Your people become actively involved in improving the process of doing the work. In this way, you are recognising and getting the true value of their experience and desire to do great work.

Common questions

Can we do this without a current strategy?

It can be tempting to put this off because you’re coming to the end of a strategic period. However, done well this will feed into your strategy and budgeting plans by giving you better information to work with. You also might see that resources and budgets do not currenty align with core strategic aims. The sooner you can see this the better. And the sooner you can start improving the practice of tracking work against measurable goals, the better your chances of delivering the next strategy.

Who should own this?

This work does need an owner (and skilled facilitation) so if you have a Delivery Lead or Head of Delivery they would be my go-to person. Alternatively you can invite interest from any of your delivery team members. If there’s no immediate candidate, my advice is to go ahead yourself, pair up with someone and delegate in due time.

Can this complement our current delivery meetings and practices?

Portfolio Kanban is designed to create more effective conversations. Expect to bring this to an existing ‘project update’ meeting or any other cross-team meeting you have. If you currently don’t have any high-level project updates, then this will become an extra meeting (but it’ll be the most effective one of them all).

If you have any questions about Portfolio Kanban or would like to adopt its many benefits please get in touch. I work with your existing Heads of Delivery, or as an interim Head of Delivery or a Delivery Consultant.