Preparing for Strategic Agile

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Agile   Portfolio Management   Strategy  

Over the last couple of years, there has been an explosion of approaches to agile that are designed to elevate it to a more strategic, enterprise-wide level. Some of the models are relatively simple and straightforward, others are remarkably complex and involved.

Like any other methodology, the right approach will depend on the needs of the organization and its ability and willingness to absorb change. However, regardless of the chosen approach to strategic agile, it strikes me that a lot of foundational work needs to happen before an organization can succeed--and I’m not sure how much awareness there is for that shift.

For the purposes of this article, I want to focus on agile from a portfolio execution perspective. That has a number of different names depending on which strategic agile approach is being referenced, but we are essentially looking at annual planning, project selection and project execution.

In most organizations, that is a fairly well established process that involves a period of several weeks up to a few months where potential projects are identified, prioritized, undertake a formal business casing (or similar) and are then selected or rejected.

A number of people may be involved in the earlier stages of the process, but by the time an organization gets to the final review and selection process, the stakeholders are usually restricted …

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