Many books, articles, discussions, and video presentations have been done about the proper way to manage an agile portfolio. Yet, with so much help available, even if such projects stayed on budget and got done on time, many IT projects don’t become successful and bring along the end results.
Further, the lack of agility leaves customers who already may not know exactly what they want or exactly what they can get their money’s worth for, dissatisfied. Customer expectations seem to increase once a project has started and rise based on the capacity and expertise of the team.
On many projects, however, the agile software can address emergency concerns and ultimately works to serve the needs of the customer better. Agile concepts will allow for the meeting of customer needs and create a balance of mixing all IT projects with the ones that will be most beneficial and successful.
In a 2015 report, Forrester Research noted, “Ask a company today what its top priorities are, and you’ll hear about growth and customer obsession. For enterprise architects working with business and technology leaders, this means investing in technology to better serve customers and using customer satisfaction metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of investments.”
The results of agile portfolio management are four-fold:
- Increase your investment returns
- Decrease time to market
- Deliver what your customers want
- Make better decisions going forward
The fundamentals of agile portfolio management are four-fold as well:
- Value Management — Helps you prioritize the work with the biggest impact
- Work Management — Coordinates the fast delivery of prioritized work
- Capacity Management — Allocates the right “resources” to the prioritized work
- Financial Management — Directs funds where they have the most impact
