With the vertigo of the current economy, factors such as inflation, the consequences of war and the impact on consumption on a global scale, it becomes increasingly necessary that each business plan is dynamic, flexible and with budgets that can be quickly adjusted. To this is added, with great weight, that managers and employees are aligned with teams made up of people who collaborate more and better, all oriented to deliver value.
One of the options we have to address the level of uncertainty in the current market is to change the way in which organizations plan and finance their portfolio of initiatives using a “Lean” approach, which is known as Lean Portfolio Management, which streamlines the value stream and optimizes the use of agile capabilities; It is one of the key pieces of Agility at scale. It is aimed at organizations that seek a competitive advantage in the ability to adapt to changes in the market, the above, added to multidisciplinary teams that work with an end-to-end visionwill be the key to the companies of the future.
Budget allocation is one of the biggest hurdles in agile scaling across the organization. In Latin America, the way of budgeting has practically not changed. According to a study of NTT Data of Agility, in Latam only 8% of companies have adopted Lean concepts in management of your initiatives. For this reason, the ability to redesign the allocation of budgets and capacities based on the promise of capturing value is key, one of the practices that companies must undertake from the start of the agile path.
Thanks to this new model, organizations can optimize their financial management, prioritize their spending decisions and consider factors related to talent management. To implement that redesign, they use agile frameworks like Lean Portfolio Management. It has been proven that startups, so well known for their quick reaction in contrast to traditional companies, are the ones that most resort to this type of approach.
Applying these principles, portfolio managers are able to prioritize investments, optimize the use of resources and determine how we measure the value provided by an initiative. This means moving from complex annual planning and budgeting cycles (the traditional approach) to more fluid and flexible planning, with a more continuous workflow.
With this new focus on portfolio management, the key is to drive the evolution of transformations towards el development of adaptive capacities at a strategic levelin order to get more value from the benefits of having a focus Lean-Agile. There are many benefits provided by this new approach, which also allows teams to change course according to variations in market and customer demands in order to successfully achieve goals.
It must be taken into account that in order to start applying “Agility” it is need to make a change of mindset and understand these changes as an opportunity for growth; knowing that this path requires skills, knowledge and experiences of those who are going to participate; see experimentation as one more part of the process; understand that this product is an element that complements agility at scale; and finally, carry out this process in such a way that the result is simple, short and useful.
*Head of Agile NTT DATA LATAM
by Victor Leon Marambio*
