Taking Your Portfolio Agile

  Agile   Lessons Learned   Strategy   ProjectsAtWork  

Agile is a team-focused philosophy. However, when transitioning a portfolio to agile, management’s role is crucial, and a clear roadmap and resource plan will serve as a foundation. Here are lessons learned from a recent agile transition of a multinational retailer’s digital project portfolio.

Transitioning a project portfolio to agile is a bit like moving your team between boats while motoring down a river. You need to ensure that everyone gets across safely and that no cargo is dropped along the way. Your team needs to arrive at the end with all of the cargo (work) intact. While teams may understand agile, or even have experience with it, management needs to get several things right for the transition to be successful.

Recently I had the opportunity to work through such a transition with a client. As a multinational retailer, this client’s portfolio had digital projects in flight targeting markets in Western Europe, Asia and North America. More were planned for the coming fiscal year. Not everything went smoothly; we definitely hit some rough spots along the way. However, we learned a few things that helped us to arrive at a product that, while still a work in progress, delivers on its priorities.

(Agile project management is not interchangeable with Scrum, but this client’s project teams used the Scrum methodology. The ideas explored here are written from …

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