If you’re managing work using an agile approach, it can be challenging to keep resources focused on the right projects that are best for the business. As your teams execute work, you need to ensure they are delivering maximum value in support of business objectives. When organizations are looking to begin agile portfolio management, it is important to understand the advantages and disadvantages to set your organization up for success.
“Adopting agile methods doesn’t mean foregoing common business sense. Keeping the flexibility where you want it and the predictability where it is needed is the best way to drive value from your agile projects. By having strategic alignment, visibility, and resource management, you have the data and insight you need to be agile.”
Why Agile Portfolio Management?
Agile Portfolio Management provides portfolio visibility and reporting into all your enterprise agile projects—resulting in better performance, results, and ROI of your team’s work efforts.
Agile portfolio management with Planview PPM Pro utilizes the Planview Integration-as-a-Service platform (IaaS) to sync with existing agile work management tools, such as Atlassian Jira, Microsoft Team Foundation Server, and CA Agile Central. Planview PPM Pro and Portfolios both have capabilities to automatically roll up the data into intuitive dashboards, enabling alignment of agile projects to your strategic objectives and maximizing the value of work delivered.
Managing agile teams can be difficult and gathering information from disparate systems is challenging without a formal process for reporting. Integrating agile tools into a portfolio management solution puts all the valuable information in one place while enabling end users to continue using the system they are comfortable with. Agile Portfolio Management keeps agile projects on track and keeps teams working toward common goals.
Strategic Alignment
Keeping agile teams focused on the “right” projects and not the “next” projects
Ensure the highest value work is getting prioritized and staffed by utilizing scoring for value-driven decision making. Using the right metrics to track portfolio performance and setting your portfolio up to measure those goals, allows your organization to benefit from agile management. Keeping projects aligned with strategic objectives enables you to:
- Know what metrics you are using to track portfolio performance;
- Measure performance against goals; and
- Establish and adhere to a timeline and track checkpoints.
By prioritizing based on alignment with strategic goals, your portfolio is set up to achieve the goals you set.
Visibility for Better Portfolio Planning and Execution
Gain portfolio-level visibility for insight into how projects are progressing, what the scope of the project is and what expectations there are for the outcome of the project. With a portfolio management solution, you can see real-time progress on a project, keep stakeholders updated, and get a clear understanding of goals you are working toward.
- Roadmapping: Build and execute project roadmaps with agile portfolio management. Get visibility across the portfolio and across the teams contributing to the project.
- Financials: Simplify measuring the true cost of agile projects. Rollup data from your agile system to report on estimated and actual time spent by team members—keeping your projects on track and within budget.
Resource Management
Business happens. Priorities change, and people change, but having an inventory of resources, a plan for those resources, and an allocation path keeps your projects running smoothly.
Capacity and demand management allows you to know what resources are working on, which ones are available, and what projects need to be staffed, so you can assign the best resources for the project based on skill and backfill projects that the resources need to be pulled from.
What-if scenario planning gives you the data you need to adapt to changing demands, project dependencies, and cross team management.
System Integration
Get the best of both worlds—keep your agile developers working in the agile system of their choice and manage the portfolio in a system that captures the data you need to make decisions. Integrate with any agile project management system, CA Agile Central, Atlassian Jira, or Microsoft Team Foundation Server, to manage the portfolio in a single system while breaking down silos and working collaboratively with development teams.
These capabilities aren’t limited to only one solution. Whether you are using Planview PPM Pro or Planview Portfolios, you can effectively utilize agile portfolio management, ensuring your resources are focused on the right projects, within budget and scope. For more information, check out the article, “Benefits of Agile Development,” or register for a demo to experience Planview’s Lean and Agile Delivery solution yourself.
