The Agile Manifesto states ‘Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.’
The problem is that most organizations haven’t defined what value is and they aren’t set up to deliver it continuously.
To do both we need a way to translate our strategies and objectives so that it provides consistent and relatable outcomes for our customers. Creating a consistent flow of valuable work via continuous intake is the way we need to work, your teams won’t be effective in another setting.
By not doing this we do what many organizations do and pursue features and capabilities that an individual customer might pay for (or someone internally thinks might be valuable), which tend not to be aligned to product strategies that move us materially forward.
The only way to enable all of this is to have a strategically aligned Portfolio Valuation Intake model that results in a consistent valuation of initiatives, features, and capabilities flowing to your teams.
SAFe’s Lean Portfolio Management approach is a good start, but there is a limitation with using the Weighted Shortest Job First method as it focuses on the cost of delay over value delivered as its method for prioritization. My Portfolio Valuation model is designed to integrate with SAFe or any other Program Intake process you may currently have.
We want to move away from a focus on cost and change to an investment mindset that causes us to define the organization's risk and return profile for the work that delivers defined value via ROI.
Look for me at the Enterprise Agility World conference where I’ll be talking about the importance of moving to a value-based investment approach to your Product Development efforts.
In the meantime, if interested ping me via Linked In or michael@soundagile.com