The document discusses challenges with capacity planning and portfolio management when focusing on individual capabilities rather than overall value. It recommends visualizing the current process to identify waste, making incremental improvements to start finishing work instead of constantly starting new work, and shifting to prioritize delivering value over optimizing capacity utilization. This will help transition from capacity-focused to value-driven development. Examples of companies adopting these practices are provided.

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Portfolio Visualisation
Observations, analysis & recommendations
16 November 2015

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What is a portfolio?
A portfolio in our terms here today:
High level overview of all the projects or programs currently in progress.

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What is capacity planning?
• You look at the available capacity and find something for them to
do.
• You plan based on skills and technical or domain capabilities, in Silo’s.

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The problem
• Always a capability in high demand
• Other capabilities are idle
• This leads to parallelization
• multi-tasking individuals
• Too much work in progress
• Always urgent things to start
• But nothing seems to get finished.
• The result is local optimization.
• And global sub-optimization.

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How we try to solve this
• Hiring
• Changing teams
• More planning

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Is hiring the answer?
• It's slow!
• Permanent hires have a lead time of at least 2 months
• They need time to get up to speed
• It's expensive!
•Time invested in looking for the right people
•Time needed to get people up to speed
•Agency fees
• It's a temporary fix!
•By the time they are productive another skill is in high demand

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Moving people between teams
• Breaks team loyalty.
• Often this just shifts the
bottleneck and we are back
to not having enough
people.

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Use planning to solve this

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The Cost of Parallelization

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Sound Familiar?

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How do we shift from this capacity
focus to a value driven model?

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Step 1 - visualize the reality, identify the waste
• Visualise the current reality
• The value stream concept to
cash
• Put it on a wall, in a room, on
a board, anywhere …
• Do this with everyone who
has a part to play in this
system.
• Identify the waste

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Step 2 - Try to clean it up
• Small incremental changes
•Identify quick wins
•Run safe to fail experiments
• Set explicit policies
•For starting new work
•For finishing work
•Dealing with ad-hoc work
• Stop starting, start finishing
•Identify the most valuable (Epic/Projects/Feature)
•Challenge yourself to finish this as fast as possible

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Step 3 - Identify value, evaluate problems
• Focus on pieces of value through the value stream
• Build these and measure the success
• Kill projects, smaller chunks give flexibility and adaptability
• Measure
• Measure lead and cycle time
• Measure for information
• Identify and evaluate problems
• Get a shared common understanding of the problem we are trying to solve
• Solve real problems don’t start with solutions
• Compare value stream with skill capacities
• Understand bottlenecks and encourage learning across silos

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Step 4 - Identify strategic opportunities
• Use lean Canvas
• Link your value items to your overall strategy
• Use Lean canvas to plan on value vs emotion and capacity
• Kill your darlings!
• Make the tough choices early
• Decide on value and information not emotion
• Planning for capacity is not going to deliver the most value
• Optimize the whole
• Empower people with information to make good decisions

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Examples...
• Momentum - Short term
insurance
• Short term insurance
division of a major
insurance company in SA
• Dev team in india
• Testers and Ba’s in SA
• +- 150 people
• 5 teams and portfolio
system

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• Siemens - Motion Control Division
• Development of Hardware with Software
• 4 different locations in Germany, Additional Teams in Hungary and USA
• 7 Projects with 4 - 7 teams each
• Mix of Scrum teams and Hardware teams
• Embedded Software and Interface development

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• Company providing infrastructure and support solutions
• Project board
• Spanning teams doing networking, desktop support, hardware set up,
application installation, server set up and support for linux and windows.
• 7 teams and Project board
• about 200 people

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Joanne Perold
Agile Coach (CSM, CSPO, CSP)
joanne.perold@agile42.com
Contact details
Niels Verdonk
Agile Coach (CSM, CSPO, CSP)
niels.verdonk@agile42.com