Course Description

All too often strategic investment decisions are out of sync with the existing capabilities and resource availability of the enterprise. To effectively execute strategy in the digital age a fresh approach to planning and delivering strategic work will be necessary.  This comprehensive one day workshop will focus on getting the highest return, most executable investments identified, resourced and ultimately delivered all at agile speed. 

Target Audience

Individuals who will benefit from this course include the CIO, the CFO and other interested division managers, senior IT leaders, the EPMO, portfolio managers, program managers, product managers, resource managers and anyone interested in getting more strategic work done in both the business and IT

Course Objectives

• Introduce a cohesive, agile/adaptive approach designed to support better portfolio decisions and to enable the ability to successfully execute strategy
• Show how changing the portfolio process can Improve project throughput by 20% with no additional resources
• Show how to deliver more value to the organization by repurposing existing PMO staff to higher value activities

Learning Objectives

• Learn how to identify the root causes of your current resource capacity management problems
• Learn how to effectively manage demand through adaptive investment portfolio management
• Learn how to revolutionize your business case process by reducing it to one 4-hour meeting
• Learn how to manage supply and demand like a digital business instead of a service center.

Course Outline

Assessing the current state of your demand management practices

• Assess the current state of your demand management processes
• Understand why many common practices are compounding your resource constraints
• Calibrate the communication throughput between IT and the business

Preparing the business case

• How a 4-hour meeting can save 100s of hours of wasted time
• Use Collaborative Business Cases to Determine Value, Initial Scope, and Critical Interlocks
• If Benefits Aren’t Clear Fund a Definition Project

Completing the Portfolio Process 

• How to do realistic resource capacity planning
• Drive a Common View of Value with Governance Members
• Building a successful Innovation Portfolio

Optional 

Managing supply (3 hours)

• Partition your resources based on your investment strategy
• Managing demand from existing applications
• Reducing run the business expenses to fund digital business

Determine resource supply

• Agile software development alone does not solve all your resource problems
• Top-down planning alone isn’t enough – you need to include your people
• Task switching is killing you – learn 5 ways to stop it.

Managing people better increases innovation

• Employee entrepreneurial orientation delivers innovation
• What makes people want to innovate? Believing they have the permission

Discussion and next steps