Our last post introduced the concept of Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM), kicking off a series of posts that will explore each of the key business imperatives you’ll need to address, and how effective SPM capabilities can help you address them.  There’s no better place to start than with the most fundamental question of all – what’s going on in your business?

Taming the Tri-Modal Reality Beast

A simple question like “what’s going on” shouldn’t be too difficult to answer.  But it is.  Because you’re most likely dealing with what we call the trimodal reality – which means that “what’s going on” is executed using a combination of traditional waterfall, agile and back-of-the-napkin work methods.  At least two of those approaches will be happy to tell you all about the status of the execution. But metrics like percent complete, story point velocity or schedule performance indexes tell you absolutely nothing about whether the work you’re managing is actually going to deliver on your strategic goals.

The Trimodal Reality Explained

Forcing everyone to work in the same style is not the answer. Some initiatives are just better suited to agile, and some to traditional methods. And ad hoc work is never going away.  What’s really needed is a common language across all those methods to integrate information in a way that makes sense.  That language is value – what value are you getting from the projects, when will that value be realized, and how well is the value aligned with your strategic priorities?

Click here to read the previous post in this series.