In the first blog post in this series, I wrote about the areas within Lean Portfolio Management that involve measurement and decision-making and how the recommended LPM activities that are intended to minimize waste may instead increase waste by relying on inaccurate measurements and decsion-making shortcuts.
In the second blog post in this series, I wrote about three LPM activities – formulating strategic themes, value stream budgeting, and prioritization of features in a backlog – and where there is room for improvement.
In this blog post, I’ll detail how you can realize more value when formulating strategic themes and key results indicators and measuring progress on KRIs.
1) Brainstorm for strategic themes. Collaborative brainstorming invites a multitude of perspectives, capitalizing on each participant’s unique experiences and knowledge. This helps lead to a broader range of ideas, fosters innovation, and helps avoid tunnel vision.
2) Prioritize potential strategic themes by collaboratively scoring their anticipated contribution to organization perspectives.
3) Analyze, socialize, and iterate on the resulting strategic theme priorities.
4) Brainstorm for the Key Results Indicators (KRIs) that will provide an accurate picture of progress towards realization of strategy.
5) Specify/confirm the expected contributions of KRIs to strategic themes.
6) Prioritize key results indicators. Don’t assume that all KRIs are equally important. Don’t simply assign priorities; derive them with pairwise comparisons.
7) Analyze, socialize, and iterate on the resulting KRI priorities.
8) Normalize KRI data to avoid comparing apples to oranges.
9) Collect KRI data at the desired time intervals.
10) Track progress on KRIs. By weighing KRIs according to their importance, we get a much better picture of progress towards our goals.
In the next blog post, I’ll discuss the specific opportunities for improving value stream budgeting.
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