A Disciplined Agile® (DA™) approach to portfolio management is important because you need to:
- Invest in the right initiatives at the right time. A key function of portfolio management is to consider, evaluate, and then invest (or not) in initiatives that reflect your organizational strategy.
- Maximize the overall value delivered by your portfolio. DA portfolio management addresses the full life cycle of initiatives, recognizing that initiatives will be monitored and guided in different ways at different points and that initiatives affect each other. The goal isn’t to maximize the value of individual initiatives, but instead to ensure that the value of the delivered by the overall portfolio is maximized. The implication is that some initiatives may need to be sub-optimal to better support other, more valuable, initiatives elsewhere.
- Enable your organizational future. Portfolio management must invest in immediate initiatives to fund the organization today, invest in medium-term initiatives in the hopes that they grow to become money earners for the organization, and in long-term innovations that may prove to take your organization in new directions in the future.
- Ensure alignment with your evolving organizational strategy. Not only do you invest in new initiatives, you must also prune initiatives that no longer reflect your strategy. Pruning includes the cancelation, retirement, or selling of existing initiatives that are either performing poorly or are a poor fit with your strategy.