So to continue on the Portfolio theme, let me talk about what to do once (or while) you’re mapping and measuring your capacity. Note that in the post above, I said that people neglect capacity to focus on work, and I meant it. But to do portfolio work well, you need both (as well as a few other things I’ll talk about later).
As a starting place, let me repost something I wrote a few years ago. The tl;dr is that a key part of developing successful portfolio flow is managing batch sizes; both in making them small enough (but not too small) and in making them roughly the same size (I’ll talk about why below):
I’m personally passionate about portfolio planning improvement as a key to any kind of Agile success. It’s harder to do for a variety of reasons – institutionally, the people who do portfolio planning tend to be executives who are somewhat … resistant … to being told to work in a different way (as opposed to telling others to work in different ways, of course!). In addition, the act of planning is much more closely tied to the enterprises’ ‘consciousness’ – its conception of self. So, it’s a sticky problem that has a lot of places where it’s connected to other things and as such, harder to change.
But boy howdy, it’s worth it.
In a conversation with a client this week, I was struggling to explain why it was so important, and finally hit on something that made sense to all of us.
Think about bricks.
If you’ve ever built anything, you’ll understand the value of standardized inputs.
Imagine building a stone wall – that is, a wall out of a pile of stones. They’re all varied sizes and shapes, and a significant amount of your work is selecting and placing them so that they fit together and collectively form the shape you intend to build.
Now imagine you’re doing this with bricks. They’re all the same size. They’re all the same shape. You can simply stack them into the shapes that you want, with a much higher level of efficiency, requiring a lot less attention and skill.
Imagine that you’re a development organization being handed a pile of stones and pushed to deliver them – build them into a structure – quickly and efficiently. Now imagine that you’ve been handed a pile of bricks.
The work that development is given by leadership is either easy for them to take in – well defined, similar in size, consistent with other work that’s being done – or it isn’t. If it is, the work of planning and intake for development teams is going to be far, far easier than it will be if it isn’t.
Now consistency (making the work readily digestible by delivery) is only a part of the issue in portfolio planning – the other huge issues are focus and value.
Focus asks the question “Do the things we’re doing strategically reinforce each other in the pursuit of larger goals? Or are they just a basket of ‘stuff’?” Are we focused on hitting the marks that are important, or just on getting things done?
And value – now value is the whole game (see P. Diddy). Are the things we’re focused on doing the valuable things? How do we know? Are we constantly confirming the value of what we’re doing?
So, it not only matters that we build our futures out of bricks – it matters that they’re the right bricks as well.
If you’ve managed a portfolio of projects in the past (and these portfolios often contain work that ranges from $25 or $50 million down to a hundred thousand or so – I am using dollars as a proxy for ‘size’ here) one of the challenges as you’re adapting/replanning is ‘fitting the work in’ – meaning ‘do I have the available capacity to do work of this size at this time?’ And that’s hard because suddenly you’re playing air traffic controller with Airbus 380’s and Piper Cubs, and that’s darn hard to do while maintaining any level of flow.
If the work is consistently sized – as when the aircraft all have similar approach and landing speeds – flow gets much, much easier.
The other advantage is that you can achieve cadence. I think SAFe is correct in advocating for a common ‘heartbeat’ of cadence across organizations. It lowers the friction of moving work from one group to another (always happens at set times), supports batch size control, and has other benefits as SAI sets out below:
So the first step in managing portfolio creation is taking work in flight and breaking it into chunks of a common size.
How do we do that well?