Adapt to Win

Chapter 6Critical Rules and Principles for Adaptive Portfolio Management

This chapter highlights “rules” and “principles” for adaptive portfolio management that are so foundational that organizations simply cannot mature portfolio effectiveness to a solid level of performance without adopting them. A “rule” is something you simply must do to reach a respectable level of competence according to our definition of high-performance Agile and Lean Portfolio Management. A “principle” is something you should understand and strive to adhere to, but there may be multiple ways to comply with it. Some of these rules and principles might be considered heretical in some traditional portfolio management circles. A couple of these are not original, but I emphasize them because they are so commonly violated. I feel it’s essential to drive these points home because unless your company is aberrant in some way, these rules and principles are foundational to maturing your portfolio process.

Rule: Decouple Supply from Demand

Do not tie funding or organizational reporting assignments of workers, resources, or machinery tightly to the projects or jobs they will be working on. Optimize these assets for productivity and fund production capacity at an appropriate level irrespective of what specific work you think might be assigned to it this year. Do not link the budget funding the delivery resources to jobs and tasks in the demand queue today—doing so increases inertia and the cost of change, making ...