Leading Indicators You Can Use To Assess Agile Portfolio Health
In this podcast, Dr. Dan Greening is back to follow up in the earlier podcast interview about Agile Base Patterns. This time, Dan and Dave Prior discuss leading indicators you can study to assess Agile Portfolio Health. During the podcast, they dig in to metrics that can be used to assess Lead Time, Abandoned Work and Fitness Functions.
Podcast Show Notes
Podcast Intro 1:48
Why Leading Indicators are important 2:30
Understanding Agility of the Portfolio 4:07
Three things to look at in your Agile Portfolio 9:30
Understanding Lead Time 9:52
How an Innovation Center can help reduce Lead Time 11:40
The trade-off required to maintain a high level of Agility in your portfolio 12:58
Portfolio Thinking and the value of running experiments 17:02
The tradeoff that comes with having a shorter lead-time 19:38
Shifting the focus to learning, not hitting a home run every time 20:31
The value of understanding Abandoned Work 21:18
What is a healthy level of abandoned work? 25:51
Studying the failure rate of your experiments and the associated cost 27:07
Low cost failure should be rewarded 28:21
Learning from failure 30:00
Understanding Agile Portfolio Fitness 32:00
Inaccuracy in understanding value 33:23
Is Kano Analysis a scientific enough way of understanding value 34:40
Cost estimates vs. Profitability Estimates 35:31
Why Product Management tends to be less accurate with estimating than Engineering 37:40
Can we gather enough data to be more accurate in Product Management Estimates? 38:44
Net Promoter Score as a simple leading indicator for assessing Agile Portfolio health 41:10
The challenge with metrics and keeping them from being perverse 44:48
The importance of looking at multiple leading indicators 47:48
How to reach Dan with follow up questions on this topic 49:30
Dan’s email: dan.greening@leadingaile.com
Dan’s blog can be found at senexrex.com/blog