Manage Your Project Portfolio

Lean Approaches to the Project Portfolio

I’ve said you need to consider lean and agile approaches to your projects and the portfolio. Agile thinking is the frequent—no more than four weeks—release of valuable chunks of product. If you’re not familiar with lean, consider some of the principles of lean in Lean Thinking [WJ96], Lean Product and Process Development [War07], and The Toyota Way [Lik04]:

• Think in terms of value. Producers create value, but customers define it.

• Know how you create value. The value stream is how you identify the problem you want to solve, how you manage creating the solution to that problem, and how the customer acquires the solution.

• Create process flow to make problems more transparent. The team has what they need ...