Getting Started with Lean Portfolio Management (LPM)

Executive Summary

Every organization’s goal is (or at least should be) to streamline their execution so they can get their products or services in the hands of their customers quickly and efficiently. The market simply moves too quickly to justify any other strategy.

It’s simple to get started 

When your business focuses on one product, and the process to get your product in the customer’s hands is short and simple, applying the basics of well-known Agile concepts like Scrum usually suffices to accomplish that purpose. 

But, if you’re trying to streamline and optimize multiple products, services, and lines of business—large, complex initiatives that may span months or even years—the goal becomes much more challenging.

It’s like turning around an enormous ship on the open ocean—slow, takes a lot of energy, and can be risky.

Business leaders who develop broad strategies and want to see them executed at all levels of the organization—or who are responsible for more concentrated bundled solutions or product categories—rightfully ask: 

• How do we most effectively execute our strategy across business units and product lines? 
• If we succeed in doing so, what benefits can we expect to see?
• And, perhaps most importantly, how do we get started?

By ‌reorganizing work to focus on value and clear solutions, organizations can streamline and optimize outdated and inefficient portfolio management processes. This method dovetails perfectly with other scaled agile processes and supports agility at the enterprise level. 

Although this is a complex set of challenges, getting started on a viable solution is actually relatively simple. 

What you’ll learn in this paper

For many organizations, the answer they’ve discovered is Lean Portfolio Management (LPM).

In this paper, we will briefly cover: 

• An introduction to LPM—what it is and how it works
• A guide to getting started with an LPM practice
• The benefits you can expect from implementing LPM
• How your organization can take the next step
• Additional resources that will help you dive deeper into this topic

NOTE: Although LPM is a proven method for aligning large scale initiatives in any industry delivering any kind of product or service, we’ll be using software for our examples. Nearly every organization today is a software organization to some extent, so the examples should resonate universally.

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