Agile Portfolio Management Advisory Services

Engagement Overview

e&e were engaged by an Insurance Technology Claims department which consists of 20 Agile “pods” working in a continuous delivery model across a department of over 200 staff.  The client has over 8 million insurance customers across Australia.

e&e provided Agile Portfolio Advisory services which involved exploring a number of different dimensions of scaling along with key Agile frameworks.  One of the key principles that was applied was to ensure that value was delivered across the project portfolio every 30 days, which involved simultaneously leading multiple self-organising teams of 6+/-3 people and managing performance within a highly complex technology environment using empirical process control.  Key cultural pillars that were introduced and fostered included transparency with inspection and adaption.  Monthly portfolio planning workshops where setup and facilitated jointly with the business and respective technology teams to assess minimal viable products (MVP’s) in progress, new MVP opportunities and collaboratively decide: continue, stop or swap MVP.  Assessing the continuation of remaining work versus the cost of delay was introduced and applied for portfolio decision-making.  In order to minimise wasted effort, a just in time (JIT) approach was used to break MVP’s down into features and subsequently into user stories.  In order to provide a greater level of transparency across the portfolio, a portfolio level electronic Kanban board was created showing all initiatives broken down into incremental deliverables (aka MVP’s).  This included filters to show high-level status of EPIC’s and the ability to drill down into detailed visual reports showing stakeholders key information such as the current progress of each EPIC and a forecast of when it will be completed.

This work resulted in providing a mechanism and associated process to provide greater transparency across the portfolio of work, empowering the executive team to remove blockers and make key decisions in-flight.