Agile Software Requirements: Lean Requirements Practices for Teams, Programs, and the Enterprise

Chapter 23. Investment Themes, Epics, and Portfolio Planning

Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice, and discipline.

—James Collins, author of Good to Great

In the previous chapter, we described ways in which the portfolio and project management functions can evolve to operate in a lean and agile manner, helping the full enterprise achieve the productivity and time-to-market benefits of agile development and the proven economic co-benefits of product development flow. In so doing, we left the requirements topic briefly in order to provide process guidance within which our agile requirements model can now be placed.

In this chapter, we return to the prime topic—agile requirements—but ...