High agility for
sustained value creation
With objectiF RPM you can:
- analyze business goals of business owners and stakeholders and derive business epics from them
- identify value streams to realize business goals
- assign projects or programs to the value streams in a portfolio
- prioritize business epics and schedule them
- develop a macroarchitecture for the solution in order to provide orientation for everyone involved
- carry out risk management and effective controlling for the portfolio
5 good reasons for Lean Portfolio Management with objectiF RPM
Because business agility begins with the portfolio
Lean Portfolio Management plays a key role for organizations striving to achieve business agility. The central challenges of Lean Portfolio Management are:
- Recognizing opportunities to create business value
- Quickly implementing innovative, high-quality solutions to achieve the recognized value opportunities
objectiF RPM helps you master both these challenges. It supports a lightweight approach to portfolio management – starting with structuring business goals and identifying value streams, and moving on to planning and controlling the projects and programs that have been created to realize the value streams.
Lean Portfolio Management with objectiF RPM means combining corporate strategy and its execution in a comprehensive lean-agile process.
Because “lean“ should also imply “without overhead”
No administrative overhead is required to set up, structure and manage a portfolio with objectiF RPM. Portfolios created using a template come with numerous results, tools and controlling instruments. Among them are the portfolio vision board, a value stream canvas, a backlog for business epics, a portfolio Kanban board, a planning view for value streams, the portfolio roadmap, a portfolio overview as Gantt chart, dashboards with KPIs and agile metrics for, among other things, employee workload, costs and progress, a Kanban board for risks, pre-structured generatable documents, real-time analyses and much more.
Further, the entire structure needed for organizing and storing all these results and elements is automatically generated when you create a portfolio with a template.
Because traceability for business goals is a must
If business agility is the aim, traceability has to begin before software requirements. In agile organizations, strategy and business goals are subject to continual change. Such changes affect business epics, value streams and thus also the projects and programs in portfolios. The effects penetrate deeply into projects and programs – to the level of user stories and code.
objectiF RPM helps you recognize at a glance which business epics were derived from which business goals. Further, objectiF RPM makes the entire path from a portfolio’s business epics to the developed solution visible across multiple projects and programs. That’s the meaning of Business Epic Traceability. It only takes one click to call up a real-time analysis for this level of traceability. In this manner you can reliably assess the effects of changes at any time.
Because quality is also part of business agility
Business agility means being able to quickly react to changes and opportunities in the market – with high-quality solutions. With templates and numerous planning and controlling instruments, objectiF RPM helps you avoid overhead and act quickly. But can it also make you better? Yes, given that objectiF RPM promotes the quality of results through pre-defined workflows such as those for stakeholder reviews.
Beyond that, objectiF RPM ensures the process quality for portfolio management through uniform structures, result types and forms. All result types and elements you create in objectiF RPM can be automatically versioned, updating the version history. That’s because version control at every level of development is essential for high process quality.
Because you do a few things differently
Setting up a portfolio in objectiF RPM only takes a few minutes – with no administrative overhead. Nevertheless, perhaps you’re looking for particular analyses, documents, planning and controlling instruments, or even specific artifacts you’re used to working with in your organization. In that case, objectiF RPM has you covered. You can customize the portfolio management template for your organization or you can modify portfolios after you generate them. There are many possibilities:
- Define new result types and modify existing ones with new properties and user-defined forms
- Create your own event-based workflows
- Create and configure dashboards, analyses, views, templates, patterns and more to streamline recurring tasks
- Increase objectiF RPM’s functionality with your own interfaces and functions
objectiF RPM provides the means to do so.
Scope of Lean Portfolio Management with objectiF RPM
Goal definition
From business goals to the portfolio backlog
Portfolio management means defining and steering the projects and programs which from the perspective of the responsible business stakeholders will create the best possible business value. But who are the business stakeholders? What are their business goals? Once business goals have been identified, weighted and potential conflicts resolved, business epics – that is, business requirements at a high operational level – can be derived. These are prioritized and analyzed for dependencies.
Business goals and business epics are stored in objectiF RPM’s repository where they are subject to version control. This puts the foundation in place for traceability from business goals, through business epics, to the delivered solution.
objectiF RPM offers the following:
- Standardized forms for inputting descriptions of business stakeholders, business goals, business epics and enablers
- A portfolio backlog for managing and prioritizing business epics and enablers
- Diagrams for stakeholders, goals and portfolio context, that simplify communication between all parties involved
- Diagrams for visualizing the relationships and dependencies between business epics and enablers
- A review workflow for asynchronous review of business goals, business epics, diagrams and more
The most important instruments for goal definition: analyses for traceability from business goals to business epics, diagrams for simplified communication and the portfolio backlog for portfolio planning
Value Stream planning
From the portfolio vision to value streams and the projects/programs of the portfolio
How can the organization’s business goals be achieved and how can the business epics be realized? What business value should be created, taking into account potential risks and available resources? Which solutions and business processes are needed to deliver this business value and what do they look like? The portfolio vision answers these questions by describing the future states of value streams and the portfolio’s solutions. objectiF RPM provides everything you need to develop a portfolio vision and identify value streams.
objectiF RPM offers several ways to set up identified value streams within a portfolio. For example, you can create value streams and while doing so assign new or existing projects to them. In the same step, you can also configure the central planning view for the portfolio. This view serves to schedule and plan business epics for realization in value streams. The planning view makes this easy by allowing you to drag and drop business epics from the portfolio backlog into the desired backlogs or folders of projects and programs within the value streams.
In summary, objectiF RPM offers the following for value stream planning:
- A portfolio vision canvas and an annotated value stream canvas, based on SAFe
- Diagrams for modelling future business processes
- A template for management documentation of the portfolio vision, from which MS Word and PDF files can be generated
- A Value Stream Wizard for creating value streams, integrating new projects/programs in the portfolio, and configuring the portfolio planning view
- Features for quickly navigating between value streams in the portfolio and their corresponding projects/programs
The video demonstrates the entire path from identifying and creating value streams to planning business epics by moving them from the portfolio backlog into a project within a value stream
Macroarchitecture design
From business epics and feature requirements to solution architecture
When all projects and programs in a portfolio are working together toward an enterprise solution or total system, it’s important that all involved teams have the same big picture in front of them. That means designing a macroarchitecture that will provide orientation for everyone involved. Macroarchitecture is designed in parallel with growing knowledge of business epics and the feature requirements derived from them.
objectiF RPM facilitates the development of the macroarchitecture:
- Simplified SysML block diagrams, tailored to the development of modern service-oriented services
- Patterns that make it possible to create architecture components in just a few clicks
- A pre-configured repository structure for managing design results
- Real-time analyses for architecture and traceability from business epics to architecture elements
The macroarchitecture makes the relationships between central business epics and solution components visible at a high level of abstraction, thus providing orientation for everyone involved. Real-time queries, such as the one visible at right, offer cross-project analyses for traceability
Controlling and risk management
Staff assignment, costs, progress, and risks – everything at a glance
Value-oriented thinking plays a central role in Lean Portfolio Management. This is particularly clear when the portfolio backlog comes into play. The aim there is to prioritize the business opportunities with the highest value in order to make targeted investments in them. Lean portfolio management also involves reviewing priorities in short cycles and changing them if necessary. In order to achieve a balance between available resources and opportunities, you need control over costs, staff assignment and work progress. Opportunities are always associated with risks and that also applies to portfolios and solutions. For that reason, in addition to controlling, risk management is a component of Lean Portfolio Management.
For controlling portfolios, objectiF RPM offers:
- A configurable portfolio dashboard with display of KPIs, staff utilization, degree of completion for requirements in the portfolio backlog, and a cumulative flow diagram for the portfolio
- A portfolio roadmap with milestones for projects and programs in the portfolio
- A portfolio Gantt chart with all projects, corresponding activities and mile stones, predecessor/successor relationships, etc.
- A portfolio treemap including all value streams with status information and results from Earned Value Analysis
- Staff utilization for the portfolio as a real-time query
- A status overview of all value streams and their projects and activities including corresponding backlogs and requirements – with a display of their individual states
objectiF RPM facilitates risk management with:
- Forms for creating risk management artifacts
- A Kanban board for steering risk management
- A state-based risk management workflow
Real-time analyses of risks and risk mitigation
What’s the status of the portfolio’s projects? objectiF RPM can answer this question in numerous ways. Here are two of them. Above: the portfolio’s projects with activities and scheduled requirements, each with their current state – displayed in a real-time analysis. Below: The portfolio roadmap with essential mile stones from all projects in the portfolio.