Quick POLL
Answer in Comments. How frequently does your team deliver business value?
1. No idea of frequency or delivery
2. We deliver infrequently, maybe a few months apart
3. We deliver regularly, like monthly
4. We deliver asap, every few days of less
5. We provide continuous delivery (CD), every change goes to customers
This is my fourth post in the series on the Nine Principles of Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) from ICAgile. Here I delve into nuances behind these principles. Please join us at the Kintsugi Training Institute (KTI) in our LPM course, where we use these principles in training on the whole Lean Portfolio Management system.
This blog is based on the seven reporter questions: what, why, who, when, where, how, and which. You can read more about this question strategy on my blog: Simpler Agile.
If you are interested in business agility, OCM, or LPM please contact me online.
What is the topic?
#4 - Define, prioritize, and deliver business value frequently
The ICAgile article defines the fourth principle as follows. Business value must be articulated in clear language using agreed-upon metrics to make work prioritization clear and straightforward at all levels. Depending on the scope of control, work is delivered in the smallest increments possible, as frequently as possible, to enable rapid feedback, learning, and adaptation. The entire organization is attuned to feedback, listening for both the loud messages and “weak signals”. Feedback mechanisms are built into every aspect of delivery and are used to learn and adapt in iterative cycles.
Why is this important?
Frequent delivery! This is the driving force in this principle. Frequent deliveries enable rapid feedback about what has been delivered. Primarily, that feedback can be used to determine if the delivered functionality and/or service has a positive impact on the customer, i.e. is it seen as valuable by the customer. Secondly, the feedback can be used to learn about how the functionality/service performs in the marketplace as compared to similar competing functionality/services, allowing for insights, innovation, and future functionality/services. Thirdly, the feedback and learning enables the organization to adapt to changes in the marketplace; e.g. new products or features previously unforeseen.
Who is involved?
This section can be parsed into three key subsections - the people who define business value, who prioritize it, and who deliver it.
There are three main groups who define business value. The obvious one is business stakeholders such as business managers, business owners, etc. They have a deeply vested interest in the success of what is delivered to the marketplace. A big part of that success is dependent on the delivered value. Here is where the second group is critical - the end users. They decide what is valuable to them and what they are willing to pay for it. The third group are the customers who directly purchase the products and/or services which provide the business value. These maybe the same people as the end users, or they could be intermediaries, such as resellers or repackagers.
The second key subsection is the people who prioritize business value. By prioritize we think about who determines the relative business value of various initiatives, features and work items. At the highest enterprise level organization-wide strategic initiatives get prioritized by C-suite executives and other top leaders, unfortunately, most times without enough input from others. The features for a given initiative typically get prioritized by the business managers, business owners, and product managers involved in the products and/or services impacted by the features. The work items for the feature typically get prioritized by product owners and other team level stakeholders. Ideally, the team members get involved.
The simple answer would be - the team working on the work items delivers the results to the marketplace. However, in reality other people and sometimes even whole other teams get (unnecessarily) involved. These could be project managers, program managers, configuration managers, release managers, and others. This occurs because many people are worried about maintaining "proper" business relations within the marketplace, with partners, competitors, customers and end users.
How is this to be performed?
The methods and practices to "define, prioritize, and deliver business value frequently" encompass the entirety of agile methodologies. It is the essence; the guiding start. We will not regurgitate all of that here. All good agile writings support this.
When is it best to do?
As with anything in agile methods, the answer is "it depends". Timing is highly dependent on circumstances. There are guidelines and suggestion, yet every team needs to defines its own way of working for optimal delivery. The key here is "frequently".
"Frequently", is usually understood to fall between weekly and monthly. However, some production support teams deliver daily. While some future focused research teams may struggle with a brand new technology for a few months before they can deliver some minimal viable product (MVP).
The ultimate goal for frequent delivery is - continuous delivery (CD), that is: every change goes directly to customers. Of course this is much easier said than done. Whole books are available on CD.
Where do we track progress?
As mentioned in previous posts, there should be a single common repository (single source of truth) for maintaining and tracking all data, so that only the latest version and progress are viewable, not an old copy or derivative. Also, as with any important document, proper configuration and change management needs to be established and maintained. That includes: delivery content, information associated to the deliver (e.g. release notes), as well as customer feedback and data associated with usage. Along with theses, it is critical that these practices be fully automated and easy to use. For example, for change control use continuous integration.
Which items are critical?
Delivering business value is essential. To get this right, we must clearly define what does business value mean to us in our business? However, there is much potential for misunderstanding. Different people have different expectation of the business, which leads to differing definitions of what is business value. For example, some business managers may want to focus on the 'bottom line' to maximize profit. To do that, they define business value as 'whatever brings in the most money'. Whereas some customer reps may want to focus on 'customer satisfaction' to maximize the customer's happiness with the business. So the negotiation between the two groups needs to be, how do we define business value such that it is both profitable and customer-valuable.
Once we have a clear, well-defined understanding of business value, which everyone accepts, we can focus on the rest of it; prioritizing and delivering it frequently. Prioritization falls out of what is most important based on our business value definition. Delivering it frequently depends how well we can decompose the business valued into small yet valuable chunks of functionality. Then we focus on delivering the smallest chunks possible in the shortest amount of time. Here WSJF (weighted shortest job first) can be a good way to prioritize.
Remember … your process will vary. So learn as you go.
References
For further learning and training on the intricacies of LPM please follow these links.
Kintsugi Training Institute - LPM Classes - https://kintsugitraininginstitute.com/icp-lpm
ICAgile - LPM Principles - https://www.icagile.com/resources/the-principles-of-lean-portfolio-management-for-business-agility
Simpler Agile blog - https://simpleragile.blogspot.com/
If you are interested in OCM and LPM please contact me online.
