What is the purpose for us using ‘Kanban‘ for Portfolio management?
At senior executive levels, it is all about churning ideas each day for your product lines.
The portfolio backlog inputs can come from Sales and Marketing teams, End users, through customer interviews, adhering to compliance, product management teams, etc… These are nothing but strategic themes.
The idea of using Kanban is as follows:
- Pick an idea from the “To Do” to evaluate if it is feasible. Limit the number of ideas picked each week for evaluation purpose (WIP)
- Most importantly create visibility to all the key stakeholders
- The strategic themes
- Prioritize the ideas which are of high business value by ensuring we get inputs from all the key stakeholders
- Allocate lean budgets for each of the value streams
- Solution Architects inputs are most vital to know technical feasibility before prioritizing
- Easiness of maintaining a visualization board
- Continuous exploration feeds the Kanban “To Do” list
Done State
- Approved Epics becomes part of the Portfolio Backlog
It is better to have a cadence preferably to review once in 2 weeks to continuously evolve as a framework to get the most valued items delivered to customers on a fast track mode. This will also help in improving upon WIP limits
