Agile Business Change Blog Thoughts on Agile Strategic Business Change and Agile Delivery

Last week, we brought together ten senior managers from a range of industries, public and private, for our monthly Second Wednesday breakfast round table. Held under the Chatham House rule, the session was facilitated by Nigel Kneill and the delegates were invited for a discussion on the topic ‘Looking at IT Projects and Programmes as an Investment Portfolio’, with the following abstract:

Using investment management techniques for the governance of IT delivery lifecycle is gaining a lot of traction. If anything, the ‘buy, hold or sell’ language is naturally engaging for senior business sponsors. At a deeper level, regularly bringing together key stakeholders during programme delivery to make decisions based on the value of IT spends, contributes to good risk management and quality assurance practices. However, IT projects are not self-contained financial products, and the knock on effects with their surrounding landscape can make a straight ROI rationale somewhat artificial to build. How can agile principles of value-based governance and stakeholder communication make the investment portfolio approach work?

The topics we propose for the Second Wednesdays are a reflection of some of the challenges that our clients are facing, and the meetings, by allowing peers to share ideas and experience, an attempt to bring elements of answers to those challenges; in this instance:

• Engaging with business sponsors using their own language and metaphors, without being dismissive of IT complexity
• Measuring the value of IT throughout the projects life-cycle so that success or failure can be recognised on a regular basis thus allowing ‘leaner’ steering (Buy, Hold or Sell)

Nigel introduced the session by reminding that there isn’t quite such a thing as an ‘IT Project’ but rather an IT element, marginal or predominant, to any business change initiative, and that bringing this wider context in perspective is a prerequisite to any attempt at measuring IT value.

A candid and open discussion followed, with some fascinating insights from all delegates. For the sake of those notes, without trying to be exhaustive about the many excellent points that were raised, I have retained three of those:

• An Executive Director from a leading investment bank argued that whilst the portfolio approach was an effective mechanism for supporting sound decision making, it was best underpinned by the concept of (IT) asset or product rather than project, thus echoing the topic of a previous meeting: Are we witnessing the decline of the project as a concept?
• A Programme Director from a public services organisation brought forward the concept of ‘organisation maturity’ as a condition for making the portfolio approach work (or fail!). Indeed, the approach is fuelled by an entrepreneurial mindset which can be hard to seed within public organisations, where the cultural inertia tends to re-enforce solution based governance over value based governance.
• The Head of Technology from a major media company stressed that a portfolio approach was intrinsically supportive of innovation, as it implicitly allows some projects to fail, which is fine as long as they fail early enough (!) and in the process, promote a culture of continuous learning.

Nigel wrapped up the June session by concluding that the Investment Portfolio is a powerful tool for implementing Agile at a Macro level, where the notion of project is the smallest common denominator for key Enterprise Stakeholders, just as the concept of user story is the smallest common denominator for protagonists within the projects themselves. Effectively, it allows for prioritising the allocation of resources according to changing business drivers and bring key financial concepts such as ROI, debt, into the decision making process