co-Authors : Anand Chellappakone, Jennifer PopePhoto by Alvaro Reyes on Unsplash
Introduction:
Portfolio Planning and Management (PPM) is a strategic process that evaluates, selects, prioritizes, and manages programs, projects, and resource allocations to meet the company’s overall strategy and goals. Prioritizing initiatives based on business goals and other relevant factors ensures better resource allocation. This not only increases overall efficiency but also aids in effective risk management by enabling us to identify and address potential risks in a timely and strategic manner. This article explores the goals, process, challenges, and benefits of improving PPM for large enterprises.
Why do PPM?
Poorly integrated portfolio planning and management obscures the visibility of interdependencies, risks, and changes throughout the year. Some of the side effects of poor planning include:
Failing to meet rising initiative demands due to inflexible budgets and capacity constraints impeded meeting rising initiative demands, risking overcommitment and underperformance. Understanding business needs and effectively communicating them to engineering teams for alignment can be challenging.A lack of alignment and communication between engineering and business about business needs.Teams struggle to balance product capability demands and operational efficiency in a dynamic environment.Poorly integrated portfolios create inefficiencies due to poor utilization of bottleneck teams and unclear tech resource assignments.Complications ensued from frequent change requests, lack of standardized change management, and absence of continuous planning tools.
These obstacles hindered optimal capacity allocation, developer utilization, and overall productivity.
Participants:
Executives set strategic goals, using portfolio program management for project alignment, efficiency, progress tracking, and direction.
Stakeholders (engineering, product, UX, analytics, business) meet to discuss overall prioritization and make key decisions, ensuring transparency and communication.
Finance teams provide budgets for resource allocation and financial monitoring for new initiatives or running the business to understand how spending will shift over the year.
Walmart employs a dual planning approach with two distinct but interconnected plans: a long-term strategic plan and a short-term operational plan. This promotes team alignment and facilitates making choices about trade-offs. An effective solution promotes shared understanding, work prioritization and budgeting. Finalizing the Annual Operating Plan (AOP) before the fiscal year end is crucial for smooth transitions and effective implementation.
Approach
The journey of PPM in the tech industry involves navigating investment, innovation, and growth changes, managing diverse assets, and understanding industry intricacies. The goal is to optimize investments that shape the future by extending best practices, enhancing planning, reallocating resources, setting benchmarks, and improving taxonomy and data quality. Also, processes and tools will be developed for business operations management and velocity and throughput measurement.
We aim to address key issues such as improving dependency and constraint identification, optimizing tech resource allocation, and facilitating trade-off decisions for new requests. This involves refining the identification process of dependencies and trade-offs, optimizing choke point teams’ use, creating a comprehensive view of resource assignments, skillset-based optimization, implementing a standard work-capturing tool and taxonomy during intake, and using tools for ongoing planning.
Automated Workflow changes were implemented to standardize the intake and associated workflow, to facilitate the engineering team’s compliance with the planning process and eliminating offline chasing for sizing and commitments. These changes improved visibility, capacity understanding, and data quality in our intake.
Planning Process Journey
Walmart strives for consistent ways of working to enhance the customer and associate experience. This is achieved through standard operating procedures, necessary forums, regular training and a common usage of systems and reporting. Our intake process uses third-party tools for Portfolio Planning, with clearly defined roles and responsibilities through a RACI matrix. Our Portfolio Planning Team manages planning documents and forms, collaborating closely with Product and Technical Program Managers. Product Managers submit feature requests through an established in-take process, ensuring accuracy and completeness. The Technical Program Manager is responsible for advancing the planning and execution process and keeping the status updated. In-depth reporting ensures transparency by offering thorough monitoring of intake tickets, providing critical information for stakeholders, and assisting in portfolio planning cycle management and prioritization.
Portfolio Planning and Management (PPM) includes evaluating and prioritizing programs and projects per their Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), strategic resource allocation to initiatives, regular portfolio optimization, and proactive risk management. These steps ensure focus on strategic goals, resource availability for crucial projects, continuous planning and execution improvements, and timely risk identification and management.
Road Ahead
As part of the continuous improvement journey, we are trialing new planning process changes to allow for improved efficiencies, less planning overhead, and more agility in delivery. These changes include:
1. Enterprise priorities involve defining core enterprise and strategic priorities for the organization to help reduce planning overhead. This is crucial for the organization’s strategic direction and for streamlining decision-making processes.
2. Single-threaded owners are assigned for each product (from Engineering, Business, or Product), with clear OKRs to provide clear accountability and ownership within teams. This approach ensures that everyone knows their responsibilities and targets, making it easier to track progress and performance.
3. Ring-fenced resources are strictly allocated for certain priorities, reduces the need for lengthy prioritization and negotiation conversations, making the organization more efficient.
4. A 12-month rolling quarterly planning strategy involves updating the planned requirements each quarter for a groomed 12-month plan. This allows for more flexibility and regular review of the organization’s strategic plan.
Additionally, the use of supporting tools, processes, and governance committees is suggested to foster new ways of working. Lastly, retrospectives and continuous improvements are encouraged for holistic learning from past experiences.
Insights
Our reporting dashboards provide comprehensive insights into our portfolio planning, including commitment breakdown, timelines of delivery, and carryovers. They centralize information management, enhance communication, and offer transparency into progress and performance. They present metrics beneficial to various teams, enabling data-driven decision-making and prioritization based on data points like inflow rate, task acceptance rate, distribution, quarterly delivery rate, and planned carryovers. Customer feedback confirms the effectiveness of our tools and process in shaping their planning.
“Really great work here. You have brought a lot of clarity to the systems here.”“Huge improvement in process and systems over the past 2 years”“Milestones for planning (and having the dates in advance) are providing the teams with more time to work with stakeholders.”“Quarterly planning process is very important for supply chain, and we need to make sure all intakes come in through this process for better planning and commitment.”
Key metrics that highlight the improvements of PPM
Productivity — by implementing rigorous processes and tools in PPM, we have reduced the planning time by half, ensuring timely quarterly planning and communication with leadership.Our Capacity Management — accuracy has improved and doubled our efficiency over recent quarters. This is key to our overall planning and execution success to meet our business goals.On time delivery — the committed requests delivered as planned within the quarter is close to our expected delivery metric. This is key to understanding execution and fulfilling customer promises.Commit to delivery — we measure the ratio of ‘Above the Line’ requests to actual delivery for each quarter. This metric has shown consistent improvement over time across the organization.Intake quality — our current intake quality (a measure of intakes missing key data at original submission) continues to improve from one quarter to the next.E2E Cycle time — using standardized procedures, we can precisely evaluate the end-to-end cycle time, time to value, identify issues, and introduce improvements to reduce cycle time annually.
Conclusion
Strategic portfolio leaders should focus on enterprise strategy in portfolio management to enhance business outcomes. This involves broadening the enterprise program office’s influence, investing in portfolio management technologies, and maintaining continuous delivery processes. Projects should align with business strategies, ensuring clear financial communication, comprehensive management, daily visibility, and accountability. Regular roadmap evaluations are crucial for maintaining relevance and effectiveness. Enterprise-level portfolio management can transform your business, even without a massive budget.
Special Recognition
We sincerely thank all teams for their dedication, collaboration, and commitment to excellence. Their skills, creativity, and innovative thinking have led to outstanding results. Special appreciation goes to our Omni Program and Portfolio Analytics group and a special call out to Alisha Dalmut Ring, Anand Chellappakone, and Ganesh Balakrishnan, for their vision and commitment in making this a reality. Their contributions have significantly elevated our organization and impacted our stakeholders. Our leadership teams in Program, Product, and Engineering have also played a crucial role in shaping our planning process. Thank you all.
Enterprise Portfolio Planning and Management was originally published in Walmart Global Tech Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Article Link: Enterprise Portfolio Planning and Management | by Satish Venkatraman | Walmart Global Tech Blog | Sep, 2024 | Medium
1 post – 1 participant
co-Authors : Anand Chellappakone, Jennifer PopePhoto by Alvaro Reyes on UnsplashIntroduction:Portfolio Planning and Management (PPM) is a strategic process that evaluates, selects, prioritizes, and manages programs, projects, and resource allocations to meet the company’s overall strategy and goals. Prioritizing initiatives based on business goals and other relevant factors ensures better resource allocation. This not only increases overall efficiency but also aids in effective risk management by enabling us to identify and address potential risks in a timely and strategic manner. This article explores the goals, process, challenges, and benefits of improving PPM for large enterprises.Why do PPM?Poorly integrated portfolio planning and management obscures the visibility of interdependencies, risks, and changes throughout the year. Some of the side effects of poor planning include:Failing to meet rising initiative demands due to inflexible budgets and capacity constraints impeded meeting rising initiative demands, risking overcommitment and underperformance. Understanding business needs and effectively communicating them to engineering teams for alignment can be challenging.A lack of alignment and communication between engineering and business about business needs.Teams struggle to balance product capability demands and operational efficiency in a dynamic environment.Poorly integrated portfolios create inefficiencies due to poor utilization of bottleneck teams and unclear tech resource assignments.Complications ensued from frequent change requests, lack of standardized change management, and absence of continuous planning tools.These obstacles hindered optimal capacity allocation, developer utilization, and overall productivity.Participants:Executives set strategic goals, using portfolio program management for project alignment, efficiency, progress tracking, and direction.Stakeholders (engineering, product, UX, analytics, business) meet to discuss overall prioritization and make key decisions, ensuring transparency and communication.Finance teams provide budgets for resource allocation and financial monitoring for new initiatives or running the business to understand how spending will shift over the year.Walmart employs a dual planning approach with two distinct but interconnected plans: a long-term strategic plan and a short-term operational plan. This promotes team alignment and facilitates making choices about trade-offs. An effective solution promotes shared understanding, work prioritization and budgeting. Finalizing the Annual Operating Plan (AOP) before the fiscal year end is crucial for smooth transitions and effective implementation.ApproachThe journey of PPM in the tech industry involves navigating investment, innovation, and growth changes, managing diverse assets, and understanding industry intricacies. The goal is to optimize investments that shape the future by extending best practices, enhancing planning, reallocating resources, setting benchmarks, and improving taxonomy and data quality. Also, processes and tools will be developed for business operations management and velocity and throughput measurement.We aim to address key issues such as improving dependency and constraint identification, optimizing tech resource allocation, and facilitating trade-off decisions for new requests. This involves refining the identification process of dependencies and trade-offs, optimizing choke point teams’ use, creating a comprehensive view of resource assignments, skillset-based optimization, implementing a standard work-capturing tool and taxonomy during intake, and using tools for ongoing planning.Automated Workflow changes were implemented to standardize the intake and associated workflow, to facilitate the engineering team’s compliance with the planning process and eliminating offline chasing for sizing and commitments. These changes improved visibility, capacity understanding, and data quality in our intake.Planning Process JourneyWalmart strives for consistent ways of working to enhance the customer and associate experience. This is achieved through standard operating procedures, necessary forums, regular training and a common usage of systems and reporting. Our intake process uses third-party tools for Portfolio Planning, with clearly defined roles and responsibilities through a RACI matrix. Our Portfolio Planning Team manages planning documents and forms, collaborating closely with Product and Technical Program Managers. Product Managers submit feature requests through an established in-take process, ensuring accuracy and completeness. The Technical Program Manager is responsible for advancing the planning and execution process and keeping the status updated. In-depth reporting ensures transparency by offering thorough monitoring of intake tickets, providing critical information for stakeholders, and assisting in portfolio planning cycle management and prioritization.Portfolio Planning and Management (PPM) includes evaluating and prioritizing programs and projects per their Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), strategic resource allocation to initiatives, regular portfolio optimization, and proactive risk management. These steps ensure focus on strategic goals, resource availability for crucial projects, continuous planning and execution improvements, and timely risk identification and management.Road AheadAs part of the continuous improvement journey, we are trialing new planning process changes to allow for improved efficiencies, less planning overhead, and more agility in delivery. These changes include:1. Enterprise priorities involve defining core enterprise and strategic priorities for the organization to help reduce planning overhead. This is crucial for the organization’s strategic direction and for streamlining decision-making processes.2. Single-threaded owners are assigned for each product (from Engineering, Business, or Product), with clear OKRs to provide clear accountability and ownership within teams. This approach ensures that everyone knows their responsibilities and targets, making it easier to track progress and performance.3. Ring-fenced resources are strictly allocated for certain priorities, reduces the need for lengthy prioritization and negotiation conversations, making the organization more efficient.4. A 12-month rolling quarterly planning strategy involves updating the planned requirements each quarter for a groomed 12-month plan. This allows for more flexibility and regular review of the organization’s strategic plan.Additionally, the use of supporting tools, processes, and governance committees is suggested to foster new ways of working. Lastly, retrospectives and continuous improvements are encouraged for holistic learning from past experiences.InsightsOur reporting dashboards provide comprehensive insights into our portfolio planning, including commitment breakdown, timelines of delivery, and carryovers. They centralize information management, enhance communication, and offer transparency into progress and performance. They present metrics beneficial to various teams, enabling data-driven decision-making and prioritization based on data points like inflow rate, task acceptance rate, distribution, quarterly delivery rate, and planned carryovers. Customer feedback confirms the effectiveness of our tools and process in shaping their planning.“Really great work here. You have brought a lot of clarity to the systems here.”“Huge improvement in process and systems over the past 2 years”“Milestones for planning (and having the dates in advance) are providing the teams with more time to work with stakeholders.”“Quarterly planning process is very important for supply chain, and we need to make sure all intakes come in through this process for better planning and commitment.”Key metrics that highlight the improvements of PPMProductivity — by implementing rigorous processes and tools in PPM, we have reduced the planning time by half, ensuring timely quarterly planning and communication with leadership.Our Capacity Management — accuracy has improved and doubled our efficiency over recent quarters. This is key to our overall planning and execution success to meet our business goals.On time delivery — the committed requests delivered as planned within the quarter is close to our expected delivery metric. This is key to understanding execution and fulfilling customer promises.Commit to delivery — we measure the ratio of ‘Above the Line’ requests to actual delivery for each quarter. This metric has shown consistent improvement over time across the organization.Intake quality — our current intake quality (a measure of intakes missing key data at original submission) continues to improve from one quarter to the next.E2E Cycle time — using standardized procedures, we can precisely evaluate the end-to-end cycle time, time to value, identify issues, and introduce improvements to reduce cycle time annually.ConclusionStrategic portfolio leaders should focus on enterprise strategy in portfolio management to enhance business outcomes. This involves broadening the enterprise program office’s influence, investing in portfolio management technologies, and maintaining continuous delivery processes. Projects should align with business strategies, ensuring clear financial communication, comprehensive management, daily visibility, and accountability. Regular roadmap evaluations are crucial for maintaining relevance and effectiveness. Enterprise-level portfolio management can transform your business, even without a massive budget.Special RecognitionWe sincerely thank all teams for their dedication, collaboration, and commitment to excellence. Their skills, creativity, and innovative thinking have led to outstanding results. Special appreciation goes to our Omni Program and Portfolio Analytics group and a special call out to Alisha Dalmut Ring, Anand Chellappakone, and Ganesh Balakrishnan, for their vision and commitment in making this a reality. Their contributions have significantly elevated our organization and impacted our stakeholders. Our leadership teams in Program, Product, and Engineering have also played a crucial role in shaping our planning process. Thank you all.Enterprise Portfolio Planning and Management was originally published in Walmart Global Tech Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Article Link: Enterprise Portfolio Planning and Management | by Satish Venkatraman | Walmart Global Tech Blog | Sep, 2024 | Medium
1 post – 1 participant
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