Resource Type: Ebook

Getting Started with Lean Portfolio Management (LPM)

Posted on March 15, 2023 by -

Executive Summary

Every organization’s goal is (or at least should be) to streamline their execution so they can get their products or services in the hands of their customers quickly and efficiently. The market simply moves too quickly to justify any other strategy.

It’s simple to get started 

When your business focuses on one product, and the process to get your product in the customer’s hands is short and simple, applying the basics of well-known Agile concepts like Scrum usually suffices to accomplish that purpose. 

But, if you’re trying to streamline and optimize multiple products, services, and lines of business—large, complex initiatives that may span months or even years—the goal becomes much more challenging.

It’s like turning around an enormous ship on the open ocean—slow, takes a lot of energy, and can be risky.

Business leaders who develop broad strategies and want to see them executed at all levels of the organization—or who are responsible for more concentrated bundled solutions or product categories—rightfully ask: 

  • How do we most effectively execute our strategy across business units and product lines? 
  • If we succeed in doing so, what benefits can we expect to see?
  • And, perhaps most importantly, how do we get started?

By ‌reorganizing work to focus on value and clear solutions, organizations can streamline and optimize outdated and inefficient portfolio management processes. This method dovetails perfectly with other scaled agile processes and supports agility at the enterprise level. 

Although this is a complex set of challenges, getting started on a viable solution is actually relatively simple. 

What you’ll learn in this paper

For many organizations, the answer they’ve discovered is Lean Portfolio Management (LPM).

In this paper, we will briefly cover: 

  • An introduction to LPM—what it is and how it works
  • A guide to getting started with an LPM practice
  • The benefits you can expect from implementing LPM
  • How your organization can take the next step
  • Additional resources that will help you dive deeper into this topic

NOTE: Although LPM is a proven method for aligning large scale initiatives in any industry delivering any kind of product or service, we’ll be using software for our examples. Nearly every organization today is a software organization to some extent, so the examples should resonate universally.

Download the white paper now to keep reading! –>

Your Practical Guide to Enterprise Service Management

Posted on December 8, 2022 by -

The speed and complexity of modern businesses are always growing and change is the only constant. To keep pace with ongoing acceleration, organizations undergo continual digital transformation. They adopt various software solutions to eliminate waste, create efficiencies, and streamline processes so they can keep pace with what their customers have come to expect, and many times, they work — to an extent.

Often, though, the very tools and processes that were expected to simplify and streamline the company’s internal workflow become a source of complexity in themselves. As a result, one department or line of business can become a silo, separated from others and struggling to collaborate effectively. More often than not, it’s the customer (the consumer of the service) who suffers in the long run, since the company is still trying to move fast, but those movements remain chaotic and unpredictable. 

There is not one “silver bullet” solution to this modern business challenge. But, a relatively new concept — Enterprise Service Management (ESM) — has proven highly effective in smoothing out the internal roadblocks standard processes often create.

In this paper, we will cover 

  • A high-level overview of what ESM is (and is not) 
  • Why it can be beneficial for modern organizations 
  • A simple three-step implementation process that’s proven successful
  • And a few hypothetical use cases that exemplify how a successful implementation improves the flow of work and information throughout the organization

What is Enterprise Service Management (ESM)?

ESM Facts to Consider:

According to the Service Desk Institute:

  • As of Q2 in 2021, 68% of organizations have ESM strategies in flight. This is up from 43% just two years before.
  • Of those same organizations, more than half consider their ESM strategies to be “well advanced”, up from just 7% in 2019.
  • Just 11% of organizations have no plans to implement ESM, down from 20% in 2019.
  • ESM is known by other names in various companies. Some call it just “service management”, while others label it a “digital transformation”. (We believe the latter is too broad to be limited to just ESM.)
  • The top three business units to successfully adopt ESM are customer support, business operations, and HR.

Enterprise Service Management is defined as “the use of ITSM principles to support all business functions across the enterprise.” While that’s accurate, it’s important to note that it’s not as simple as copying and pasting the ITSM playbook into Marketing, Finance, HR, and so on.

It is common for IT organizations to have established ITSM processes in place that may serve as a launching point for ESM in the broader organization. But, by applying the relatively complex processes, tool components, and governance requirements required in the IT department to all business units, the organization risks overwhelming team members in Marketing, HR, Finance, and other groups and, in the end, lowering adoption rates and setting up the ESM initiative for failure.

Perhaps a better definition of ESM is:

An optimized combination of the right software solution, well-thought-out processes and workflows, and customized automation that effectively supports a customer-centric, data-driven approach to each service an internal business unit undertakes. 

In some cases, certain aspects of an existing ITSM solution may carry over to the larger ESM program, but only to the extent that it fully supports the business unit’s goals and limitations. We support collaboration across the organization but recognize that IT tooling and processes do not translate to all business units. It is beneficial for an organization to consult a partner with experience in successfully delivering ESM to analyze and develop solutions. 

Download the white paper now to keep reading! –>

Whitepaper: ART Metrics

Posted on December 3, 2022 by -

ART Metrics cover

A Train Leaves the City Traveling at 65 Miles Per Hour…

An Argument for Baseline ART-Level Metrics That Actually Prove Success

As a SAFe® Fellow, Agile consultant, and trainer, I love working with clients to establish their first Agile Release Trains (ARTs) and watching them start reaping the benefits of a scaled Agile practice. 

But, there’s a challenge that I see consistently in these situations: my clients struggle with determining how well their ART is performing using concrete measurements. This gets in the way of the vital “inspect and adapt” cycle that holds such an important place in the Agile methodology. After all, if there’s really no established definition of success or consistent means of measuring performance against that goal, how will you know what needs to be improved? And, if you can’t prove your first ART is succeeding, how will you get approved to expand the pilot program?

“The problem….is metrics. It is a situation where if you can’t count what is important, you make what you can count important.”—James Willbanks (Army Advisor)

To address this issue, many organizations make the mistake of tracking vanity metrics. 

These are simple measurements that look good on paper, but that don’t really say much about the success of the program or track improvements that matter. Some examples include:

  1. How many ARTs have been launched
  2. How many people have been trained
  3. Velocity

These are certainly measurements you can (and probably should) track over the course of establishing and scaling your ARTs. But, they don’t really have any bearing on how successful the ART is. They don’t identify opportunities for improvement in the ART’s effectiveness. They just report how busy the ART has been.

The Metrics That Matter

So, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about metrics that matter.

How do we demonstrate that we have made improvements? That the new way of working is worth adopting? How do we show that the ART is sustainably improving in its ability to generate value?

The best way to demonstrate success is empirically. But, it’s not enough to look at one value in a vacuum. Rather, it requires a balanced view. In the end, I settled on four domains: 

  1. Team Health
  2. Quality
  3. Productivity
  4. Predictability

Each domain has a set of basic metrics that every organization should be able to collect and analyze without investing too much time and effort.

We will look at each domain in turn but first, we need to understand the difference between leading and lagging Indicators.

Download the white paper now to keep reading! –>

SAFe® Transformation with Cprime: Tools to Consider Before You Start

Posted on November 17, 2022 by -

How to embrace the disruption that SAFe® Transformation brings to your teams and create a sustainable enterprise-wide value?

The decision to launch Agile Transformation is usually dictated by a unique combination of organizational goals and challenges that keep you from achieving them. These may include insufficient processes and inappropriate management framework, fragmented collaboration and lack of visibility into the bigger picture, outdated technology, and tools that do not communicate.

Here’s a brief overview of all the services that allow Cprime to take a holistic approach to shape your journey to Enterprise Agility while providing a clear answer if SAFe® is the proper framework for you. Learn what Cprime does to help you design long-term strategic vision, harness technology, enable teams, and improve business continuity through SAFe® adoption.

 

View Guide

The Life of a Lead: A Study in Success With Enterprise Application Integration

Posted on November 10, 2022 by -

Based on research by Bettercloud, organizations with more than 1,000 employees use over 150 different apps, on average, to do business. Smaller organizations use about the same, proportionally speaking. From IT to marketing to sales to finance, every department has its own stack of tools they work with. But do these dozens of valuable solutions talk to each other? Can data be easily and automatically shared across the enterprise?

In many cases, the answer is no.

When collaboration and data sharing are necessary, a hodgepodge combination of spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations generally suffice. Shared folders, email, and Slack generally make essential documentation hard to find. These high-maintenance, primarily-manual processes are familiar and comfortable despite being rife with inefficiency and errors.

Is it any wonder inertia keeps organizations running in this fashion? But, there IS a better way.

Download this whitepaper today to learn about Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and how your organization can take advantage of EAI to streamline business processes, increase efficiency and productivity, and achieve greater business success.

Using Lean-Agile Principles to Execute Organizational Transformations

Posted on September 21, 2022 by -

As the speed of business increases exponentially, many organizations find themselves in an awkward position: knowing they need to fundamentally change how they do business, but unsure of how to approach such a monumental undertaking. The pandemic and all its effects have greatly accelerated what was already a dizzying situation.

Without a doubt, organizational transformation is nothing to be taken lightly. Handled poorly, it can upset years of hard-won success. Even if handled well, there are bound to be growing pains. But, approaching change with the correct principles in mind and focusing on comprehensive change management can mitigate risks and make the entire process far smoother.

In this white paper, we will be outlining portions of a tried and true framework for organizational change. We will discuss how the steps outlined in this framework can be applied using Lean-Agile methods, and examples of how organizations we’ve worked with have done just that.

Cprime and ITIL: The Key to Unlock Optimized ITSM

Posted on August 29, 2022 by -

The modern IT department manages a host of complex challenges on any given day; from routine ad hoc hardware problems (“turn it off and turn it back on again, Daryl”), to the maintenance of mission critical hardware and software systems. IT is central to the ongoing success of most organizations today, so it only makes sense that IT teams are always on the lookout for ways to improve.

In this whitepaper, we will break down Information Technology Service Management (ITSM): what it is, why it’s important, and how it can be improved. We’ll do this by following some of the day-to-day challenges experienced by IT teams. Along the way, we’ll discuss:

  • The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework
  • The role tooling plays in achieving ITSM success
  • A solution offered by Cprime to help put these pieces together

Download this whitepaper today!

How to Align Organizational Culture with Agile Frameworks

Posted on April 5, 2022 by -

Organizational culture can be defined as a set of values, behaviors, and beliefs that contribute to the unique social and psychological environment of an organization. Agile frameworks can have a powerful and productive influence on organizational culture when aligned.

Can Company Culture and Agile Frameworks Align?

This paper offers guidance on how to choose the best-suited Agile framework based on existing culture, and how to maximize that alignment between your organizational culture and the Agile framework you choose to adopt.

Download this whitepaper to learn more.

Five Keys to Strategic Alignment and Enterprise Agility Using OKRs

Posted on January 4, 2022 by -

One of the most critical aspects of enterprise agility is alignment. If an organization is not strategically aligned at all levels, it can’t achieve true agility. And, the first step toward alignment is establishing strategic goals for the company that can be effectively mapped down through all levels, resulting in the individual tasks employees carry out daily.

The creation and communication of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) form the foundation of ongoing strategic alignment. It is the single most critical piece of the puzzle because effective OKRs can cut through politics, smooth change management, reduce friction between teams, and dramatically improve engagement across the enterprise.

Download this whitepaper to learn more about OKRs and how they help businesses seeking practical tools for goal setting and strategic alignment.