AGILE METHODOLOGIES AND

DEVELOPMENT IN ORGANISATION

February, 2018

AGILE IN PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT

Srinidhi P and Khavi Priya B

SDNB Vaishnav College for Women, Chrompet

Department of B COM [Honours] III Year

Padhuvimi.nithi@gmail.com

Khavi12798@gmail.com

Citation: www.investopedia.com

Product Strategy and Portfolio Management of IBM, 2009

 AGILE IN PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT
Srinidhi P and Khavi Priya B

ABSTRACT:
The term Agile has been derived from the Latin word Agilis, which means relating to or
denoting a method of project management, used especially for software development that is
characterized by the division of tasks into short phases of work and frequent reassessment and
adaptation of plans or able to move quickly and easily. Portfolio management is the art and
science of making decisions about investment mix and policy, matching investments to
objectives, asset allocation for individuals and institutions, and balancing risk against
performance. Portfolio management is all about determining strengths, weaknesses, opportunities
and threats in the choice of debt vs. equity, domestic vs. international, growth vs. safety, and
much other trade-offs encountered in the attempt to maximize return at a given appetite for risk.
Agile Governance at the Portfolio Level is meant as a portfolio is a collection of programs or
projects and other work grouped together to facilitate effective management in order to meet
strategic business objectives.

KEY WORDS:
Portfolio Management, Agile, Project Management, Epic, Governance.

AGILE PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT:

1. AN EPIC:

It is container for a solution development initiative large enough to require analysis,

definition of a Minimum Viable Product [MVP] and financial approval prior to the
implementation. Implementation occurs over multiple Program Increments [PI] and follows the
Lean setup „build-measure-learn' cycle. It describes the following:

 Consumer desirability- What the customer or consumer wants?

Ask consumer or customers to rate the importance and satisfaction of each epic by
using opportunity and a combination of qualitative and quantitative studies.
 Business viability- Does this make any money?
It requires business case with key assumptions including revenue, gross margin, cost
of running which can be easily cancelled if progress is not acceptable with fast ROI.
 Technology feasibility- can we build this?
Agile teams develop and monitor capacity based on story points at iteration level.
Epic are being given points and estimated in portfolio level. It is important to make
sure that the company has required assets and competences for implementation of
each topic.

2. AGILE PORTFOLIO PLANNING:

 Prioritize epics at portfolio level

 Establish sizing model for epics, features and stories
 Understand consumer/customer desirability of epics
 Understand business viability of the epic and have revised business cases quarterly
 Just prior to release planning boundaries [Break epics into features and size features and
Prioritize features]
 At Release Planning Business case drives vision which drives features

3. BENEFITS:

 Maintain the sense of urgency and positive pressure across the project to avoid the death
march.
 Start reducing risk much earlier in the project. Provide visibility and better changes to
manage changes.
 Start delivering ROI immediately by simply starting to deliver something meaningful
earlier. In waterfall model, revenues start coming after deadline if even then.
 Delivers better fit for purpose. Less consumer dissatisfaction.
 A single integrated view of projects and products.
 Best practice project and resource management capabilities.
 Cross-project, multi-enterprise executive dashboards and portfolio analytics.
 Automated task completion based on product deliverable lifecycles.

4. KEY FEATURES:

 Project and product integration.

 Best practice project management.
 Executive views of resources and portfolios.
5. CHALLENGES:

 Governance slows down the progress.

 Even with governance, wrong initiatives are undertaken.
 Even with governance, initiatives fail to be deliver value and/or waste time and money.
 The true status of initiatives is hidden behind misleading reporting and statistics.
 “Reporting” costs money-the most comprehensive reports are, the more they cost to
produce and the less likely they are to be read.

6. HOW DOES AGILE PFM HELP?

 Governance is focused on adding value to the organization and also to the business
processes used to create value.
 The mindset of always referring back to the business vision and goals help to ensure the
right initiatives is undertaken.
 There are many more defined checkpoints in agile, particularly as value is being
delivered early and often.
 Agile governance is based on transparency rather than reporting. Part of this is an
environment of honesty, collaboration, constant communication and demonstration of
control.
 Report is kept as lean, simple and accessible as possible and is designed only to alert the
governors to potential issues so that they can manage as required.

7. CONCLUSION:
The Agile Project Portfolio Management Framework (APPMF) is a framework
within which people can address complex portfolio management problems, while
productively and creatively delivering projects of the highest possible value. APPMF
works well with any project delivery method from scrum to waterfall, and anything in
between. Defining strategy needs to come before APPMF. In order to select the right set
of projects to execute, the strategic goals must be defined in advance.