Applied Enterprise Workflow with the SAFe Portfolio Kanban: An Experience Report By Dr. Thorsten Janning, SPCT at Kegon AG Note: This article is part of the Community Contributions series, which provides additional points of view and guidance based on the experiences and opinions of the extended SAFe community of experts. Introduction The Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) is the world’s leading Framework for scaling Agile across the enterprise. For many, the best-known and most mature parts of SAFe are the roles and practices on the program level— the home of the Agile Release Train—the heartbeat of any Agile business. But as the industry matures its Lean-Agile practices, more enterprises are now implementing Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) on their journey toward becoming a true Lean-Agile enterprise. This involves a more extensive application of SAFe, applying SAFe principles to strategy formulation, evolving the governance structure, and aligning to delivery. The backbone of the Lean portfolio process is the Portfolio Kanban, as it defines the flow of new enterprise initiatives within a portfolio. The Kanban implements Lean-Agile principles on this level and describes the roles and activities of the portfolio process. In this paper we will explain our experiences and practical knowledge about the roles, artifacts, and practices in implementing the Portfolio Kanban, in some cases going beyond what SAFe describes. We hope this background will help improve planning, budgeting, and the governance of your enterprise, giving you the ability to react faster to changing markets and make value-based portfolio decisions rapidly, with transparency, and without losing control. The Importance of Lean-Agile Principles Before we begin however, we must take a moment to dwell on SAFe’s Lean-Agile Principles, as they are the basis for all successful practices at the portfolio level. When it comes to strategic planning and guidance of the enterprise portfolio, we find three particularly relevant: Principle #1 - Take an economic view Principle #2 - Apply systems thinking Principle #9 - Decentralize decision making Why are these three so important? For managers, the suggestion to “take an economic view” seems obvious. But it’s important to recognize that the tools and metrics of the Lean economic framework differ from traditional project-control and resource management practices. After all, if we want to move from optimizing the utilization of our teams and knowledge workers to optimizing the product development lead time, we must change a lot of things, including: Project management techniques Metrics and roles The structure and agenda of various steering committees The tools for planning, estimating and prioritizing initiatives How the new budgeting process should be implemented Secondly, applying systems thinking affects the portfolio process in different ways. For example, the Lean-Agile portfolio process provides new mechanisms to align stakeholders (sometimes even competing divisions) to a single prioritized backlog. Decentralizing decision-making further informs the needed behavior of ourselves and our leaders. If we want our enterprise to respond faster, we must decentralize more decisions, letting the people make them who are closest to the problem and have the local knowledge. This results in fewer people having to wait to take action, and better, faster decisions. But to do that, we need organizational alignment. Every knowledge worker—our defacto decision-makers—must understand the vision and strategy, and be aware of risks and rewards that come with making decisions daily. That is why it’s necessary for management not only to have a clear strategy but also to communicate it to everybody repeatedly, along with changes. This allows everyone to align their work and decisions with the communicated strategic themes and objectives, resolve conflicts between business and IT, and handles continuously changing priorities of different business divisions individually and amongst the teams. The SAFe Portfolio Kanban System