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Lean Portfolio Management 101
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Lean Portfolio Management 101

Tina Behers
Tina Behers
5 March 2024
8 min read
Three people working together stood on connected cogs
Tina Behers
Tina Behers
5 March 2024
8 min read
Our second Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) blog explores the critical roles, cultural shifts, and prominent challenges organisations face embracing this transformative approach.
Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) focuses on shifting your organisation from a more traditional approach of annual planning and budgeting cycles with fixed expectations to a more continuous agile approach suited to today's volatility and market disruption. This allows people to think about the flow of value through the business as a whole and focus on areas where the most opportunity lies.

What are the key roles in lean portfolio management?

In Lean Portfolio Management (LPM), a couple of key roles are essential in facilitating effective portfolio management and aligning with organisational goals. Here are the key roles typically involved in the LPM Portfolio Management Team:
Portfolio Manager:
The most important role in LPM is the Portfolio Manager. They work with senior leaders to ensure the portfolio's initiatives align with the organisation's strategy and objectives. It's their job to optimise resources by assigning the right skills to each initiative. They also put mechanisms in place to measure performance and ensure the flow of value. And it's on them to create a culture of innovation with fast feedback loops that encourage continuous improvement.
Portfolio Product Owner:
This person represents stakeholders' interests, collaborates with teams, and ensures portfolio initiatives align with strategic goals. Manages stakeholder relationships and communicates priorities.
These key roles must align and work together to ensure that the initiatives within the portfolio are directly aligned with the organisation's strategic objectives. This ensures that value is delivered efficiently and agile practices are effectively implemented across the organisation. Effective role clarity contributes to the success of Lean Portfolio Management practices.
Additional roles that support LPM include:
  • Agile teams
  • Epic owners
  • Lean-agile leaders
  • Value stream stakeholders
  • Communities of practice
  • Release Train Engineers (RTEs)

Developing an LPM culture

Developing an LPM culture involves fostering a mindset and practices aligned with Lean principles throughout the organisation. Here's how you can cultivate a Lean Portfolio Management culture:
  • Encourage and support collaboration and communication—make it easy for teams and stakeholders in the same value stream to work together. Find ways to increase transparency, share knowledge, and involve others in decision-making.
  • Promote a culture of learning and innovation—support experimentation and a positive approach to feedback. You can also build more opportunities for people to improve and learn new skills.
  • Provide training and support—don't expect everyone to get it immediately. Give people the knowledge they need to succeed at lean and agile working.
  • Celebrate your successes—take time to reap the rewards of all your hard work—and not just when things have been smooth sailing. Celebrate lessons learned from projects that haven't quite gone to plan, too.

What are the typical challenges?

While LPM isn't that hard to understand in theory, making the change can pose several organisational challenges. That's why it's so important to have senior leadership involved in undertaking LPM in the first place. Here are a few things to keep an eye out for:
  • Poor organisational response—for successful adoption, you need proactive support from leadership and all stakeholders to be engaged. A poor response and the inability to adjust accordingly will make it much harder.
  • Resistance from operational functions – breaking down silos and centralising decision-making can be hard if certain parts of the business refuse to cooperate.
  • Knowledge gaps—your people need to understand lean-agile principles, strategic portfolio management and enterprise architecture to define value streams or business problems and ensure your work aligns with wider objectives.
  • Unprepared teams—just because you've managed to identify and prioritise what work needs to happen, teams must be prepared, resourced, and skilled enough to do it. Collaboration, communication, planning, and resource optimisation are key here.
  • Practical failings—if you don't have the funds, resources, or data to support putting LPM in place, getting it off the ground will be hard.

What tools support Lean Portfolio Management?

LPM isn't possible without the right tools in place. But where do you start with so many solutions to choose from? The tool you choose should carry out lean budgeting, funding, and governance, value stream planning, agile program management, and agile team costing and capitalisation.
Beyond that, you'll want to get a clear overview of key program information and real-time information, with the ability to drill down into detail and accurate reporting features that share the health and progress data of your programs and release trains.

Jira Align

At Adaptavist, we’re experts on Jira Align from Atlassian—it allows knowledge to flow seamlessly throughout an organisation—from the C-suite to the team level, connecting strategy and goals to execution and delivery of work with ease. Our Jira Align Expand to Portfolio service helps you start with LPM, adding portfolio management to Jira Align, including lean budgeting, lean-agile leadership, and capacity planning.

Targetprocess from Apptio

This powerful cloud-based platform empowers organisations to plan, track, and prioritise work across the enterprise. It makes your CFO and financial planners an integral part of your transformation. And it's highly customisable, with out-of-the-box templates so that you can tailor it to your chosen agile framework and your organisational structure.

Structure by Tempo

Another tool we rate highly is Structure, an add-on for Jira Align. It gives you control over your portfolio and lets you view, organise, and manage your work using flexible, user-defined hierarchies. Use it for project and sprint planning, reporting, release, and service management. Customise your Jira data views to work for you, helping you easily track progress and get real-time insights right in Jira rather than exporting them to an external app.

What training can help?

Getting your people up to speed on LPM is one way to improve their chances of success. With the right knowledge and experience under their belt, LPM leaders can help ensure adoption across the organisation. SAFe provider Scaled Agile offers a Lean Portfolio Management course to help executives, project management offers, and other key stakeholders plan dynamically and be flexible enough to adjust initiatives and budgets as the market changes.
On the course, you'll learn how to connect the portfolio to the enterprise and strategy to work execution, integrate feedback, create lean budgets and guardrails, and adapt as you go.

Learn from the experts

And you can always lean on The Adaptavist Group's expert consultants when it comes to implementing SAFe processes like LPM. If you're interested in discovering more, you can watch our webinar, Lean Portfolio Management Masterclass, where our expert Tina Behers explores how you can move from legacy systems to LPM with Jira Align.
Written by
Tina Behers
Tina Behers
VP of Enterprise Agility
With 25+ year's experience in transformation, business process management, program management, and corporate strategy, Tina helps our clients realise the full value of agile at scale. She is also a Jira Align authority, with almost a decade's experience in the tool.