Lean Portfolio Management

About Lean Portfolio-Management

The goal of Lean Portfolio Management is to align the organization to a goal and, in view of the market conditions, to implement the corporate strategy in a targeted manner. Since agile methods such as Scrum, Kanban or SAFe^® and LeSS have significantly improved and accelerated the development of new products, portfolio and budgeting processes are still very rigid and regulated even in modern companies. This is exactly where Lean Portfolio Management comes in. Lean Portfolio Management uses agile ideas to quickly implement valuable initiatives within a company and to sort out less valuable initiatives and projects, thus allowing the company to adapt quickly and flexibly to market conditions.

Comparison Portfolio Management versus Lean Portfolio-Management

The following table shows some differences between classic and Lean Portfolio Management:

Portfolio Management

Employees are scheduled
Employees work on many projects at the same time and are moved back and forth between them
Extensive and detailed elaborations are made before the development starts
Budgets are defined, approved and monitored individually for projects
Portfolio planning is carried out once a year

Lean Portfolio Management

Agile teams are involved in decisions
Tasks are given to fixed agile teams that deliver incremental value to different requesters
Lean Business Cases set the framework for new developments, details are given in the course of the work
Budgets are defined, approved and monitored for products or value streams
Portfolio planning is adjusted during the year