Welcome to the ultimate guide on how to guarantee the failure of your Lean Portfolio Management! (Attention: Irony!)
So you’ve decided to implement Lean Portfolio Management? Excellent! You’ve just taken the first step towards a voluntary nosedive into the depths of inefficiency.
Don’t worry, you don’t even have to try to fail. With these tips, you’ll stumble right into the waiting traps. Sit back and enjoy the show as your Lean Portfolio Management implodes in a glorious firework display.
Of course, I can only offer a few brief thought-starters here. If you’d like to delve deeper into the matter or need help addressing your specific requirements, I’m happy to assist you personally. I can also provide the images in high resolution for poster printing or customized to your company. Just get in touch! Contact
#1 Ignore WIP Limits
Why should you limit teams to a few tasks when you can burden them with everything at once? The main thing is that everyone is constantly busy! Under no circumstances should you stop ongoing activities if you have new ones scheduled to start immediately. Otherwise, someone might think you’ve made a mistake in your planning. Whether the issues are ever completed is irrelevant.
Now seriously: Less is often more. Focus on the most important tasks and avoid multitasking. Give your teams the opportunity to concentrate on a few activities and complete them. This will increase efficiency and the quality of the results. Define clear priorities and communicate them to the teams. Create space for focused work and avoid unnecessary interruptions. Ensure that your employees complete tasks before starting new ones. And remember: High utilization does not automatically mean high productivity. Sometimes it makes more sense to pause or completely stop individual tasks in order to concentrate on the really important things.
#2 Ensure Intransparency
Strategic plans? Don’t share them with all employees under any circumstances! It’s best to guard this important information like a treasure and only let a small, select circle of executives participate in it. Shouldn’t decisions be made in secret?
Now seriously: Transparency and openness are not just buzzwords, but form the foundation for successful collaboration and motivated employees. Empower your employees to act independently by providing them with transparency. Grant them insight into the strategic plans so that they recognize the vision and the meaning of their work. Also show them the funnel and explain the prioritization of tasks and projects. This helps them understand the context of their work and better assess their own contribution to overall success.
#3 Detach the Portfolio from Strategic Alignment
A corporate strategy? That’s just theory! At best, maybe a nice marketing campaign. Don’t you think reality looks quite different?
Now seriously: A clear corporate strategy is essential for the success of any company. It provides orientation, defines the long-term vision, and forms the basis for all further decisions. Align your portfolio consistently with the strategic direction. This ensures that all projects and initiatives contribute to achieving your vision. Close coordination between strategy and portfolio allows you to use resources efficiently and leverage synergy effects. Review your portfolio regularly and adapt it to the strategy. A clear strategic direction creates transparency, motivates employees, and increases the likelihood of achieving your goals.
#4 Focus Only on Big, Long-Term Goals
Who needs measly epics with measurable value? True heroes lose themselves in year-long, confusing initiatives without clear goals! The main thing is to be on the way to something big – whether you ever reach it is irrelevant. Right?
Now seriously: Especially in today’s fast-moving world, tangible epics are essential for structuring complex projects. Define clear goals and measurable intermediate results to track progress and react to deviations early on. A realistic schedule that helps you use your resources efficiently and meet deadlines can only be created based on clear goals and measurable intermediate results. Break down large initiatives into smaller, manageable work packages to reduce complexity and maintain team motivation. Regularly celebrate successes and learn from mistakes to continuously improve.
#5 Ensure Arbitrary Prioritization
Who needs objective criteria for prioritization when you know best what to do? Whoever earns a lot is, of course, always right – after all, they have reached the top of the hierarchy. So why waste time on long explanations and justifications?
Now seriously: Objective criteria and transparent decision-making are the basis for effective prioritization. Don’t rely solely on your gut feeling. Instead, use methods like WSJF (Weighted Shortest Job First) to prioritize tasks. Consider the business value, risk assessment, and time expenditure of the tasks. Involve the teams in the process and give them the opportunity to express their opinions and participate in decisions. Clear and comprehensible communication of prioritization creates understanding, promotes motivation, and allows teams to work efficiently and purposefully.
#6 Allocate Capacity Only to Selected Aspects
Ah yes, non-functional requirements! Why should you need something as theoretical as stability, security, or performance when you can exclusively demand lots of colorful features?
Now seriously: Non-functional requirements may not always be tangible, but they are still essential for the success of a portfolio. You should not ignore technical debt, but reduce it early on to avoid bigger problems in the future. To do this, it is necessary to provide sufficient capacity, rather than letting the teams work on these issues only on the side when there is nothing else to do. That won’t happen. Actively plan capacity for all aspects of your value stream. If you don’t, you risk these aspects not being implemented at all.
#7 Finance Tasks
Why finance entire value chains when you can have individual tasks completed on demand? Doesn’t that sound much more flexible and agile?
Now seriously: Instead of viewing tasks in isolation and assigning them individually, a holistic approach is recommended. It is particularly critical when individual tasks are omitted simply because their importance to the whole is not understood. In the worst case, this can jeopardize the entire value chain and trigger a domino effect. Gradually, other tasks then lose their function.
By understanding the details and dependencies of tasks and placing them in a larger context, portfolio management can fulfill its purpose: to pursue strategic alignment by financing entire initiatives and thereby creating sustainable value.
#8 Ensure Blind Flight
Portfolio metrics? Why bother when you’ve always managed perfectly fine with project traffic lights? “Management by Hope” has served its purpose, hasn’t it? Or has hope alone perhaps not been enough to manage a successful project portfolio?
Now seriously: Of course, it’s tempting to rely on your gut feeling. But reality shows: Without measurable metrics, managing a portfolio is like flying blind. You never really know if you’re on the right track or heading straight for a wall.
Portfolio metrics are essential to create transparency regarding the actual processes. They uncover weaknesses and potential for optimization and provide the basis for well-founded, comprehensible decisions that can be better discussed. By analyzing metrics, risks can be identified and minimized early on. In addition, common metrics facilitate communication between different stakeholders, as they create a common language and a shared understanding of performance.
Portfolio metrics are therefore not a nuisance, but an indispensable tool for successful portfolio management.