Hi Folks,

To use an idiom (even when they are not recommended!), implementing a SAFe Lean portfolio can be “the long pole in the tent” in building the SAFe Lean Enterprise. It’s one of the hardest and most impactful things you can do to ‘right size’ the tent for an enterprise portfolio. What’s more, while there is a lot of guidance in SAFe and in the Roadmap, each implementation has to be ‘purpose built’ for the context of that enterprise.

Visualizing the work, establishing policies for decision-making, figuring out who can make those decisions, designing the Portfolio Kanban, establishing WIP limits, measuring flow through the Kanban, fostering Epics—all of these and more must be established in order to get new and innovative epics flowing through the system.

Experience helps.

To that end, I’d like to introduce a new advanced topic article by Dr. Thorsten Janning of Kegon AG, Applied Enterprise Workflow with the SAFe Portfolio Kanban.

Thorsten is a SAFe SPCT who tends to focus on strategic aspects of SAFe implementations, and that’s almost always portfolio level concerns. In this new article, Thorsten shares some of his experiences in implementing SAFe portfolios. Here’s a ‘grabber,’

“(To implement Lean Portfolio Management) we created a portfolio scrum team within an investment bank portfolio process. A value stream analysis indicated that over 70% of the lead time of the development for a new financial product was spent for analyzing the business requirements and restrictions, before any IT assignment. While our portfolio scrum team discussed the current state of their analysis every week, and each member pulled new tasks for the next week, the lead time for the business analysis has been reduced from the estimated nine months to less than three months!”

If you want to learn more about how to get results like that and see some interesting perspectives on implementing a Lean Portfolio, read the article.

Thanks Thorsten for the insights!

Stay SAfe
– Dean