Welcome to the Applying Scaled Professional Kanban class.

"What are our teams working on?” “How well does our execution match up with our stated strategy?” “Are we as an organization efficient, effective, and predictable?” Leaders across most organizations want to know the answers to these questions.

This workshop is for anyone who has asked these questions or wants to help the organization find the answer to these questions. This class will help you set up a Kanban system that helps your organization continuously inspect and adapt the value delivery process. You will gain greater visibility into what team(s) across the organization are working on and what is in the way of getting value delivered.

Learning Outcomes

After attending the course, learners will be able to :

• Set up systems that provide transparency into what teams are working on
• Evaluate if the current work maps to the overall stated strategy
• Manage the entire portfolio on a regular cadence
• Quickly understand the reasons that are preventing work from making progress
• Predict when higher level objectives would be met
• Look for opportunities to continuously improve efficiency and predictability of the process
• Validate if the organization is being effective by delivering the right things

Who Should Attend

The Applying Scaled Portfolio Kanban course is for anyone looking to bring the benefits of Kanban to every level of the organization. If you are looking to influence your organization to be more efficient, effective and predictable, this course will provide you the tools to achieve those goals. Typical attendees include Heads of Departments, Agile Coaches, Project Managers, Development Leaders, Product Owners, Scrum Masters, and Product Managers

Topics

• Defining and designing a Portfolio Kanban Board
• Understanding how to effectively operate the Portfolio Kanban system
• Reconciling active work with stated strategy and vice-versa
• Visualizing, managing, and removing dependencies as well as blockers to work
• Forecasting completion dates for items across the Portfolio
• Improving the performance of the entire organization by leveraging data

Validated Learning

After taking the course, you will have an opportunity to validate that you understand scaling Kanban topics. We will invite you to take an online assessment that evaluates your understanding and provides you with guidance on areas to improve. Should you pass the assessment, you will receive the “Scaled Portfolio Kanban” (SPK) certification and will be issued credentials through Credly.

In this class we will cover the following outline  -

Day 1 - Define the Portfolio

• What is Portfolio Kanban
  • Activity - Understand our current work breakdown structure and select which level of items to represent on the portfolio board.
• Understand the steps in the portfolio process
  • Activity - Design a board that represents the current process, determine commitment and delivery points.
• What “rules” do we need in place
  • How does the Portfolio Kanban connect with team level boards?
  • Activity - Determine Entry and Exit criteria. How do we represent Dependencies? What is our WIP?
• Setting expectations from the process - Evaluating existing data to determine a Portfolio SLE

Day 2 - Operate the system

• Portfolio Metrics
  • Cycle Time, Throughput, WIP, Work Item Age, Customer Performance Metrics
• Portfolio Planning
  • Activity - Discussing how much/when to commit to customers. What impact do our metrics(WIP, CT, TP) have on delivery dates?
• Portfolio Cadence/Frequency
  • How Often do we meet for overviews? How often do we re-evaluate priorities and plan?
• Connecting to Strategy
  • Evaluate existing work against OKRs, Initiatives, and/or Goals for the business
• Budgeting
  • Does our budgeting line up with our strategy and the work in the portfolio kanban

Day 3 - Improve the system

• Forecasting
  • How do we use team and portfolio level metrics together to produce reliable forecasts?
• Portfolio Feedback Loops
  • Effectively utilizing batch size, customer feedback on value and outcomes
• Continuous Improvement
  • What is our starting point?
  • What are patterns to avoid?
  • How will this evolve?
• Closing 
  • Activity- what will you watch for, what actions will you take, etc

Looking forward to seeing you there.