"So on any given day, I'm just managing those planes and flight patterns and trying to make sense and create that sequencing of road maps. Or at least highlight, hey, you're not going to achieve that, because this strategy over here in this portfolio isn't even thinking that way” - Christine Babowicz

When we decided to start inviting guests to join us, we were passionate about finding people with real lived experience to share their hard-won insights and wisdom. We were very grateful when Christine Babowicz agreed to join us as our second guest, and she certainly brought plenty of wisdom.

Christine currently serves as Head of Global Execution Excellence at MetLife. She joined MetLife almost nine years ago after spending time at Intel and Adesa. Initially serving in a PMO capacity, she became involved in the launch of MetLife’s Global Lean-Agile CoE 6 years ago. It quickly became a pull-based global agility and ways of working transformation.

Her role has recently expanded into partnering with Enterprise Strategy and 16 portfolios across MetLife to bring their AI strategy to life, focused on creating differentiated experiences for their associates and customers.

Over the years, she's spoken at various Agile Conferences and SAFe Summits, and her topics show her passion for leadership empathy during times of change. She was also a founding member of Raleigh-Durham Women in Agile. Recently, her leadership style and transformation efforts have earned her the Triangle’s Business Journal 40under40 award.

Our conversation takes us through her journey as a change leader over the past six years. Christine shares the challenges of forming an Agile PMO amidst established practices and how her background in lean thinking shaped her approach. We discuss the importance of translating between old and new methodologies, building empathy and trust with stakeholders, and focusing on the problems portfolio leaders face rather than the solutions the textbook provides. She also shares the value of grounding conversations across portfolio boundaries in the organizational mission and a deep understanding of business processes.

As a leader, she highlights the privilege of these transformative roles and the importance of staying humble and prepared when navigating such complex landscapes.

In this episode, we cover:

• (00:00) Introduction
• (05:44) What was it like forming an agile PMO in the middle of a very project-centric world?
• (11:01) How do you navigate the translation between the old and new worlds?
• (15:21) What triggered your transition to portfolio?
• (21:03) With 16 portfolios, how did you pick where to start?
• (24:50) What was your first step once you found your leverage point?
• (30:08) What’s critical for a coach trying to connect with portfolio-level leadership?
• (35:27) What secrets have you found to enabling change across portfolio boundaries?
• (39:56) As a change leader, how do you make it safe for your team to tackle challenging conversations?
• (47:28) Have you found recurring patterns that enable scaling of your change efforts?
• (52:46) How do you help leaders balance aspiration and obligation?
• (59:52) What parting wisdom would you share?

Cast:

Christine Babowicz

Eric Willeke

Mark Richards

“The right collective organization tends to have fewer blind spots, because, by definition, a team is a transactional memory system of sufficient predictive power that we can know how to work together” - Luke Hohmann

When we decided to start inviting interesting guests to join our portfolio conversations, Luke Hohmann was an obvious first choice.

Luke is a four time author, three time founder, SAFe® Fellow, keynote speaker, and internationally recognized expert in Agile Software Development. His passion is sustainably profitable businesses, because it is only through sustainable profits that a business can thrive.

As Chief Innovation Officer of Applied Frameworks he works with executives to fulfill their mission of helping our customers create sustainably profitable businesses. His most recent book, Software Profit Streams™: Designing Sustainably Profitable Businesses , is co-authored with Jason Tanner and shares key insights from their experience helping businesses succeed.

He co-founded Every Voice Engaged, a nonpartisan 501c3 nonprofit that helps citizens, governments, and nonprofits collaboratively solve unsolvable problems. He founded Conteneo, creator of Weave, the Strategy Engine, and Knowsy, later acquired by Scaled Agile Inc.

Our conversation blends deep insights with practical advice. Luke shares stories from his extensive experience, discussing how to start a Lean Portfolio Management journey by understanding and improving existing practices rather than introducing entirely new ones. He emphasizes the importance of having the right people at the portfolio table, including often-overlooked roles like finance and HR, to ensure a balanced and holistic approach.

Luke also delves into the cognitive challenges leaders face in balancing long-term strategy with immediate operational demands, offering strategies to navigate these complexities. He highlights the significance of recognizing when something should no longer be a portfolio concern, advocating for a focus on reducing unnecessary burdens to maintain agility. Throughout, Luke interweaves his Profit Stream™ thinking, showing how profitability can be integrated into portfolio management, especially in traditional settings. He concludes with a compelling argument for why embracing these practices leads to a more sustainable and successful organization.

In this episode, we cover:

• (00:00) Introduction
• (06:00) Where do you begin your Lean Portfolio Management journey?
• (14:25) What are some common mistakes you see people make?
• (18:57) Who are the right people to have at the Portfolio table?
• (35:56) How do Portfolio Leaders manage the cognitive load of balancing tomorrow’s strategic focus with today’s operational demands?
• (40:17) How do you determine what should and should not be a Portfolio concern?
• (47:43) How do you introduce your Profit Stream thinking into more traditional Portfolios?
• (56:19) What is your parting wisdom on why someone should embark on this journey?

Cast:

Luke Hohmann

Eric Willeke

Mark Richards

"The journey to get there isn’t easy. The outcomes, when it works, are pretty amazing and unbelievable, but you’ll find a whole new set of problems you never imagined could go wrong"

Eric Willeke

With the initial arc complete, this episode adopts a new perspective triggered by our conversations at the SAFe Summit in Berlin. We step into the shoes of portfolio members, embarking on a lean journey. The conversation begins by exploring how their first steps into lean portfolio management will look different from your first steps into agility. As the episode unfolds, we delve into the changes you might anticipate, from shifting boundaries and constraints to evolving events and workflow. We also explore how the relationship with senior stakeholders will transform, requiring greater ownership, self-discipline, and proactivity. The conversation highlights the importance of patience and empathy for yourself and those leading the portfolio as everyone navigates this uncharted territory. As with any significant change, there will be moments of discomfort and uncertainty, but the potential for growth and increased collaboration is immense.

In this episode, we cover:

• (00:00) Introduction
• (03:12) What are some differences between beginning the portfolio journey and beginning the team or team-of-teams journey?
• (11:10) What are some of the first changes you might expect as the portfolio you’re a part of starts its lean journey?
• (16:11) How might your constraints change
• (23:29) What sort of changes might you see in portfolio events?
• (29:12) What about the flow of work?
• (34:05) How should your connection to senior stakeholders change?
• (37:35) What shift might you experience in the expectations between you and your portfolio?
• (44:29) Which growth challenges might you encounter as a leader?
• (46:34) What should start to disappear?
• (55:45) How does the dynamic change when the portfolio is no longer the police?
• (1:02:33) What if it looks like they’re making mistakes?

Cast:

Eric Willeke

Mark Richards

"You get a mad underspend in Q1; then you spend Q2 and Q3 trying to catch up on the questions about your Q1 underspend. This is variation waste, and causes massive issues in terms of the ability of the system to absorb the work" - Mark Richards

In this episode, we turn our attention to the application of lean to Portfolio Operations and Governance. Eric focuses on improving flow, while Mark wants to reduce waste. We start by looking at aggregating and analyzing patterns from portfolio members. Discussing moving from PMO to VMO is a prelude to exploring the lean evolution of portfolio events and governance.

We cover:

• (00:00) Intro
• (2:16) How does the systems view of the portfolio help you find points of leverage?
• (10:31) What happens when you aggregate and analyze problem data from portfolio members?
• (15:10) Why are standards so important to portfolio insights?
• (19:38) What typical patterns does a portfolio-level view of Inspect & Adapt events reveal?
• (23:51) How can you learn from analyzing escalation patterns?
• (32:10) What’s the difference between a PMO and a VMO?
• (38:01) What happens when you apply the classic lean waste definitions to portfolio operations and governance?
• (46:42) How does monitoring and governance change in a lean world?
• (51:41) How do you improve the data that supports effective operational governance?
• (1:02:04) Is empathy still important for strategic portfolios?

Cast:

Eric Willeke

Mark Richards

Book References:

Lean Product and Process Development – Allen Ward

From PMO to VMO – Augustine

"In most cases, the portfolio itself is under a fog of war. You can't actually see what's going on unless you take your telescope and really zoom in on an area" - Eric Willeke

This episode concludes the initial six-part arc laying the foundations of lean portfolio management. The first five episodes were devoted to building a clear picture of your portfolio ecosystem. Picture in hand, we explore the insights it might yield and the ensuing interventions they should trigger. The conversation dwells primarily on strategic insights, exploring the concept of 'acting this fiscal year' with operational interventions and preparing to activate strategic interventions next fiscal year.

In this episode, we cover:

• (00:40) Episode Intro
• (01:56) How do you avoid just having great conversations?
• (05:14) How do you pick the right interventions and get support to act on them?
• (16:13) Why start with strategy? What are some typical insights, what kind of interventions do they yield, and how does the fiscal year influence things?
• (33:26) How do you leverage operational interventions to act on strategy insights?
• (38:24) What happens when you focus on portfolio-level strategy insights rather than the ecosystem?
• (51:13) How do you move from executive hunches to data-driven insights and interventions?
• (58:05) What about outcome-based insights?
• (1:03:51) Wrap

Cast:

Eric Willeke

Mark Richards

Show Notes

"It's common for people to say they have a platform strategy that doesn't necessarily resemble a platform strategy so much as a center of dependency hell" - Mark Richards

In Episode 3, we explored the influence of Moore's Zone to Win model on understanding the portfolio ecosystem. Episode 4 explored the role of purpose, context, and structure in modeling the ecosystem you have and starting to look at it through Lean eyes. In this episode, we combine these ideas with the portfolio examples defined in the SAFe Portfolio article Eric contributed to last year. This sets the stage for exploring leveraging the examples to make sense of the portfolio ecosystem you have today and begin to think about the one you'd like to have tomorrow.

In this episode, we cover:

• (00:39) Episode Intro
• (02:51) Why is understanding the portfolio ecosystem so important?
• (05:31) What was the thinking behind SAFe's Portfolio examples?
• (15:49) What is the Single Portfolio example, and when is it too simplistic?
• (26:37) Which portfolio examples live in the Performance Zone?
• (54:10) Why are the Productivity Zone examples so useful?
• (01:06:31) How do you avoid the misconception that an Innovation Portfolio is the only place where innovation happens?
• (01:13:07) Why do none of the examples naturally map to the Transformation Zone?
• (01:18:43) Wrap

Cast:

Eric Willeke

Mark Richards

Show Notes

Book References:

• Zone to Win – Geoffrey Moore

Other References:

• SAFe Portfolio Article

"Create the visualizations that are going to be useful, do some cleanup work to create the space for people to think a little more deeply, and then make sure you don't waste their time so they can put some wins on the board" - Eric Willeke

With our love of strategy off the leash in Episode 3, we continue down the path this episode. We explore why strategy matters so much to portfolio design. This provides a bridge to understanding how portfolios evolve and change over time, the critical characteristics to clarify early, and the questions that might emerge. It's no use having interesting questions if you have no time to wrestle with them. We conclude the episode by examining some of our favorite approaches to creating space for critical conversations.

In this episode, we cover:

• (00:39) Episode Intro
• (1:38) Why is understanding the portfolio's role in the ecosystem important?
• (10:27) How does strategy influence the internals of the portfolio?
• (16:51) What's the best way to begin 'becoming lean'?
• (33:49) Why are purpose, context, and structure essential to clarify?
• (48:09) How do you create space for executives to have conversations that matter?
• (01:04:58) Wrap

Cast:

Eric Willeke

Mark Richards

Show Notes

Book References:

• Zone to Win – Geoffrey Moore

"I don't want to have a minnow next to a minotaur because the minnow is never going to feature in the conversation" - Mark Richards

This is the first episode where we deep-dive into strategy. Whether your portfolio is shaping a strategy or deploying one shaped elsewhere, you need tools to contextualize it in the overall enterprise. We take horizon-based investment and Geoffrey Moore's Zone to Win model and explore what happens when you use it as a conceptual model for your portfolio ecosystem.

Along the way, we discuss our belief that you should be able to take an overall enterprise strategy and model your portfolios as logical pieces of it. Each should have a clear purpose and context, and collectively they should add back up to the whole. Our conversation explores the implications of each of Moore's four zones and the insights and implications that emerge when you leverage them to characterize your portfolios.

In this episode, we cover:

• (00:39) Episode Intro
• (3:00) Why partition your strategy?
• (7:01) What is horizon-based investment?
• (14:38) How does Geoffrey Moore's Zone to Win model help us understand portfolios?
• (24:56) What is the Performance Zone and how does it apply to portfolios?
• (38:31) What types of portfolios live in the Productivity Zone, and what are the strategy implications?
• (49:04) What is the difference between general "innovation investment" and the Incubation Zone?
• (55:41) When does the Transformation Zone come to life, and what kind of strategies play out there?
• (1:05:02) Wrap

Cast:

Eric Willeke

Mark Richards

Show Notes

Book References:

• Your strategy needs a strategy – Reeves, Haanaes, Sinha
• Zone to Win – Geoffrey Moore