SAFe® Lean Portfolio Management

Rami Sirkiä

Senior Enterprise Coach and Managing Director

Rami Sirkiä has MSc in Management Accounting, is SAFe® Fellow & SPCT and has bridged the finance function and software development function when he implemented a planning and financial system that complied with Scaled Agile SW development. Now he is helping companies to succeed in enterprise level agility.

Sami Tervola

Senior Enterprise Coach

Sami has over 20 years of experience in different deliveries in different industries in service, project and later in agile world. Sami was first trained in project management. Then he heard about agility and SAFe and how journeys can be made differently. Nowadays Sami teaches, coaches, implements and fixes agile journeys as SAFe SPCT Candidate, SPC, RTE, PMP and OKR coach by working with business and IT teams.

One of the biggest reasons for adopting an agile operating model is the ability to respond to the customers' changing needs. Digitalisation changes the business environment rapidly, and also brings change to an organisation’s product and service management. However, we have seen that organisations often strive to advance too many large programs simultaneously without having a clear link to the overall strategy. Lean portfolio management ensures that strategically important topics are advanced in teams' daily work. Lean portfolio management enables portfolio leadership to lead intelligently towards organization's vision.

The flow of work and quick value delivery are the most essential factors when defining efficiency in the digital age. However, often people are torn between multiple programs and separate assignments. Work becomes fragmented and doesn’t progress as quickly as it could. The organization tries to accomplish various development programs simultaneously with the same resources and multitasking ending to create lot of waste too.

Lean portfolio management creates an understanding of what impact you are aiming to have with your work —leading to the most important things, according to the company’s objectives, being realized and the strategy being executed daily.

Course description

The course will give you the know-how to implement lean portfolio management in your organization. Lean portfolio management supports the execution of a company’s strategy in the daily work and at all levels of the organization.

The course covers the principles of lean portfolio management and the practices needed to support daily work. You will learn to create visibility for the entire organization of why the chosen assignments are relevant. With the learned practices, you can guarantee that strategically relevant work is completed and that the same objectives are worked on from multiple angles.

Basics of lean portfolio management
Connecting the portfolio to the company’s strategy
Vision: how to create a vision and direction, and what is the impact of the work
Lean budgeting in portfolio management
Creating portfolio visibility with Kanban
Aligning operative work to support the portfolio
Coordinating across values streams
Measuring lean portfolio performance and impact
How to implement lean portfolio management

Target group

The course is for everyone involved with lean portfolio management who needs to make business and prioritization choices. For example, the course is beneficial for:

Portfolio leadership and managers
Business executives and people around them who advance the strategy in practice
PMO personnel
Architects
Program and system leaders
Epic owners
Lean-agile coaches
Release and Solution Train Engineers

Anyone is welcome to attend this training, but familiarity on SAFe and basic lean and agile concepts are highly recommended.

Business benefits and outcomes of training

Better alignment: Helps connect strategy with execution, ensuring that all teams work towards common goals.
Increased agility: Enables organizations to respond quickly to market changes and customer needs which enables product and work intelligence.
Improved decision-making: Provides tools and frameworks for making informed decisions about investments and resource allocation.
Enhanced collaboration: Fosters teamwork across different departments, breaking down silos and improving communication.
Effective risk management: Teaches how to identify and manage risks early, reducing potential issues in deliveries.
Optimized resource use: Helps organizations allocate resources more effectively, maximizing value delivery.

These benefits lead to improved performance and greater success in achieving business objectives.

Relevance in mature Nordics markets

Focus on innovation: Nordic markets prioritize innovation and its intelligence. LPM helps organizations accelerate their product development to meet this demand.
Alignment with strategy: LPM ensures that all teams are aligned with the organization's goals, which is crucial in competitive markets and organizational intelligence.
Adaptability: Organizations can quickly respond to changes in customer needs and market conditions, enhancing their agility.
Collaboration: LPM promotes teamwork across departments, breaking down silos and improving communication.
Risk management: It provides tools to identify and manage risks early, which is important for maintaining quality and compliance.

These factors make SAFe LPM training a valuable investment for organizations in mature Nordic markets.

Certification

The attendees can take an optional SAFe Lean Portfolio Manager Exam after the course. Attendees who pass the online exam receive a SAFe Lean Portfolio Manager (LPM) Certification. For more information about the certification exam, please visit Scaled Agile websites.

Duration of the course:
- Online: 4 modules 4 hours each
- Classroom: 2 days

NEW: Optional extra workshop

On top of this training we are willing to offer you something extra: a workshop within your own organization. This workshop prepares the enterprise to successfully adopt and execute SAFe Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) in your specific portfolio.

Topics to be covered:

building a roadmap
planning how to execute LPM activities
building an adoption plan for LPM practices

Participants needed:

SPCs, senior leaders, members of the APMO, LACE, and other key stakeholders

The workshop can be facilitated as single big team or in several smaller groups. If the workshop is run in several small teams, outputs from the teams will then be discussed jointly and combined as the combined output.

Nitor is Scaled Agile Framework SAFe® expert contributor

Learn the SAFe -framework from its contributors! Our coaches have long practical experience in applying the framework to different business contexts. Since its development, many nitoreans have contributed to the SAFe framework evolution since version 0.93, and we have received the rare SAFe Fellow -recognition. By the end of 2024, Nitor has trained over 11 000 private and public participants on scaled agility, with high customer satisfaction reviews. Most of these SAFe training participants made the included but optional online exam and earned globally recognized SAFe badge which they proudly shared in CVs and social media.

Evolution continues. Nitoreans keep the deep expertise so that your organization can benefit from working with SAFe® and us.

Don't miss out! View the public training calendar or ask for a private training session and secure your spot now to make a significant impact in your organization.