Agile and Beyond 2017

Have you ever wondered whether the endless stream of features you are building really make a difference? With so many possibilities for business, vendor software, and technology investment, how confident do you feel that you are placing the right bets to move your business forward? Are you achieving the multiples of return that you could be? How do you know? Agile and Lean practices applied to strategy and portfolio management can give you a disciplined approach to align investments with strategy and optimize value by enhancing portfolio decisions with early and frequent investment feedback from customers. Come learn about how companies like Ford are leveraging this approach to reduce the lead time to get investment opportunities to market, measure their impact on business results, and adjust investment plans frequently to maximize business outcomes.

Key take-aways for participants:

1. Learn about the fundamentals of agile portfolio management and how these practices enable value delivery at the speed the business requires

- Thin-slicing large multi-million dollar investments into small, valuable deliveries
- Leverage enterprise business architecture maps and connect investment opportunities to their impact on the business value stream(s)
- Collaboratively harnessing the creativity of the business and IT solution acumen to surface and articulate innovative opportunities
- Empower stable, high performing teams to take reasoned risks while delivering business value in nimble ways

2. Learn about the experiments being conducted within Ford which include:

- Dropping the cycle time for customer initiatives to valuable, delivered solution from 2+ years to 9 months
- Setting up robust methods to compare small, better articulated investments that always include Why
- Enabling more frequent portfolio steering to ensure value delivery and make better investment decisions
- Encouraging more direct measurement of value on investments
- Align investments to business value streams to build trust with the business and improve IT’s strategy
- Build predictability by creating stable, high-performing teams that are in consistent collaboration with their solution-building partners
- Drastically simplify financial approvals and financial tracking while converting portions of the PPM governance to keep focus on building the right thing