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New Story Po
New Story Po
New Story Po
Product management is the art of taking strategic objectives and turning them
into tactical activities. Disciplined agile product management is performed in a
collaborative and evolutionary manner that reflects the context of your
organization. Disciplined agile product management includes the acts of:
Program management
The aim of your sales efforts is to, you guessed it, sell your organization’s
offerings (both products and services) to customers. Your sales people, if any,
will work very closely with your marketing team to ensure they are focused on
selling offerings that reflect your organizations’ overall strategy. They will also
work closely with product management to ensure that what they’re selling is
available or can be built in a timely manner. Organizationally Sales is often
combined with marketing or may even be matrixed into business operations.
Companies typically realize only about 60% of their strategies’ potential value
because of defects and breakdowns in planning and execution (Kendall &
Rollins, 2003). Application of the following seven best practices will help the
executive leadership team maximize the returns on their portfolio investments.
1: Keep it simple, make it concrete.
Strategy is a highly abstract concept at most companies. Strategy is often
confused with vision or aspiration. Strategy is not something that can be easily
communicated or translated into action. But without a clear sense of where
the company is headed and why, lower levels in the organization cannot put in
place executable plans. In short, the link between strategy and performance
can't be drawn because the strategy itself is not sufficiently concrete. The AIM
process described earlier in this paper provides a framework to help the
Initiative teams translate strategic initiatives into concrete, actionable
projects. To start off the planning and execution process on the right track,
high-performing companies avoid long, drawn-out descriptions of lofty goals
and instead stick to clear language describing their course of action. By being
clear about what the strategy is and isn't keeps the enterprise headed in the
same direction. Resource and action planning becomes more effective; and
accountabilities are easier to specify.
2: Debate assumptions, not forecasts
High-performing companies want their forecasts to drive the work they
actually do. To make this possible, they have to ensure that the assumptions
underlying their long-term plans reflect both the real economics of their
markets and the performance experience of the company relative to
competitors. Separating the process of building assumptions from that of
preparing financial projections helps to ground the business unit–corporate
center dialogue in economic reality. The Opportunity Profile Workbook, an
integral part of the AIM process, provides a framework to help each Initiative
Team quantify their assumptions. Fact-based discussion resulting from this
kind of approach builds trust between the top team and each unit and
removes barriers to fast and effective exec
The AIM cycle process as described in this paper was developed by the Mesa
Research Group, LLC.
Abstract
Project Management helps ensure that projects are done right. Strategic
Portfolio Management determines the very future of the enterprise; its
competitiveness, and ultimately, its survival. Think of strategic successes such
as Microsoft, Costco, and Starbucks and strategic failures such as TWA,
Digital Equipment, and WordPerfect. Each had a strategic portfolio. Each
made strategic decisions on what to place in their portfolios and how to
execute. Some have thrived. Some have not survived. This paper provides a
framework for developing and maintaining an enterprise-wide Strategic
Portfolio Management capability.
This paper defines and champions Strategic Portfolio Management which the
author believes is the natural, evolutionary next step made possible by the
foundational enterprise project management (EPM) tools and process
currently being implemented in many organizations.
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