Alberto Dominguez – Lean Portfolio Management through GitLab Epics

As your transformation expands across your company, all of a sudden you have the responsibility of managing a portfolio of projects and products and that can take a lot of work in our next session, Alberto Dominguez shows us how Sperta Consulting uses GitLab Epic's to minimize all that work so you can actually focus on creating value. Let's see. Welcome to this presentation of Lean Portfolio Management, I'm Alberto Dominguez, and I'm quite happy to have you here on this presentation.

Hope you like it. T. projects for the last 20 years.

I had been working on software development and mainly most of the time with some social and volunteering projects. I have been working as agile transportation consultant and I have been coding. I have been working as an architect, 14 step lead coder.

I really enjoy to code. But for some of the other work, I have been assigned to more management and leading positions. I really enjoy the technical details of the stuff.

And and based on that experience and the career I have, this is kind of a mix of coders, teacher and and and consultant. So I hope you like what we see here on lean portfolio management through GitLab epics. So I will try to share some some of the.

Learnings that we have had in the past to applying GitLab to some specific kind of things, so hope you like it. Welcome. OK, before we start, we need to discuss what one means lean portfolio management.

And to do that, we need to split that term in two. We Have portfolio management and lean portfolio management and portfolio management is the way the organization views the strategic level of a company has to connect his vision or is vision to the to the to the operational level. Right.

So we have this these people at the C level, our thinking on where the company has to go, and then they decide the initiatives or the project they want to run to accomplish those goals. And that's what we call portfolio management, because we have like a goal, a destination. And we need to convert that into into a Tactical decisions into small task and actions that we can run to at the end of the year or the period we decide to get there.

So that's what we call portfolio management when you manage your priorities. And the other word is lean portfolio management, which means applying the lean principles to make things really lean, to reduce the well, what the what we call in lean the waste to be more productive. So why we need it.

So to explain why we need it. I want to talk about the Glutton Syndrome is something I, I kind of create this kind of concept, which is that when when companies try to do more of what they can do right. They try to include more products.

And what we call it the Glutton syndrome is because it simple is when you see that you are the richest person in the world and you get to a restaurant and when you get to that restaurant, it's your favorite restaurant. You see all the plates and you cannot decide which one to take. And you say, OK, I have the money to pay for all this and you pay for all of them.

It doesn't make any sense. Right? It's like, OK, you have the money, but it's obvious that you can't eat them all at the same time.

And it's great you can decide for two and try to make your best to eat both or just decide for one and wait for the next period, the next day for the for the next. So you have to prioritize it, not only because of the money, it's also because of your capacity to do it. And when we talk about IT projects in particular, we don't have the people all the time to run the projects you have.

We are the world, everybody in the world. We have this shortage of people. So we cannot just say, okay, I have the money, I can run it.

So that's why I called the Gluton Syndrome it is really common to see companies running the eight hundred projects at the same time and the IT areas and the IT teams just trying to make it work through the year. And obviously it is something that we don't like in lean because it's a lot of work in progress. So basically LPM will give us an idea how to focus on the important as a team, as a company in a portfolio.

It will work and maximize the flow and the throughput as as a way to optimize the productivity, tries to keep the tactical decisions aligned with the goals. So when you have to take decisions day by day, you can easily lead your decisions to this, to the goals you are following. And and the idea behind the basis is stop trying to predict the future.

You should be working on planning and adapting your plan every day or every certain time, like time, both like that, like quarterly and say We call those the the program increments. But you can decide your quarters or every six months or every month depending on your company. But the idea is you take the time to decide, you have to adjust your plan.

Right. So behind this, the idea is keep your priorities, understand that you cannot run everything at the same time, even if you have the money, is not a good idea to try to do everything at the same time or in parallel and try to keep your decisions aligned with your goals. So you so, so, so the argent doesnt eat all the time, the important things.

So how, how, how we do it through epics. How, how GitLab can support you to work on that. It's, it's simple.

The idea behind this is not to work on projects is not to work on, on, on time for of all the project is to work on a something bigger that is called a system for value delivery or business value the delivery. And the idea is that you create the teams that will support those requests and those business needs and then you make them flow to those teams instead of creating projects teams. The idea behind projects teams is really painful for the company that doesn't work in that way all the time.

But for example, if you have an IT area or organization within the organization, which is not IT related broadly, you have projects, but all those projects come to the same people so you don't create a system for value. The leverage you are trying to accomplish the project teams and you will have people assigned on multiple on multiple projects at the same time jumping within meetings and trying to understand the projects within the meeting. So that's basically the biggest challenge behind us.

We have a lot of of. Of thinking movements that try to decide if we should go on the project type project, that type of organization, or if we should go on the more efficient way we can not create project teams. So if that's your case, which is for me, most of the cases of my clients and the teams I work for, what we try to do is to set the teams and make those teams aligned to the to the products and the technologies we work we work with and and then avoid the project assignments.

Right. And think all the time that DevOps is not just software and hardware, it's also people. And the most important thing is the people.

And secondly, DevOps is not just a trendy word you. You have to invest to make it work. You have to think as a team, there are no areas, there is no business and technology.

It is a team that tries to deliver value. So that's why we talk about value delivery system and the and the good thing is that it's not easy at all. But the idea at the end is that we all work together to get the things done.

We don't think about projects, we think about teams. And by teams we work on assigning goals to the teams instead of task or projects or specific things. It probably makes sense to you if you are already working on something called value streams on enterprise architecture, and when you when you think about the teams as a group of people that believe it is a whole set of value for a process or a business or or a segment on your company.

So how we accomplish that on GitLab, we first you have to work on the organizational structure, you have your groups and your subgroups, and probably what we do there is to create value streams as subgroups of the organization. You can go deeper, of course. But for this example, we will try to keep it simple and we avoid the projects.

We will not see groups of projects here at the level zero in this example. We will have the organization. And at the level one, we will have these teams and values streams.

You can have multiple value streams. You are using the solutions that bigger solutions or managing bigger solutions. And at the level three you can have products, for example, switch level two, because you can have multiple teams or different parts of the team.

Once you have the structure really organized, you go to the team match with products and ideas that you have some products or technologies or architects or some on the technical side that could be managed by the same people. So you try to align those people to those products. And the idea is to keep all the requirements flowing through those products.

So at that point, you have the teams and the products and then plus you create that epics at the organizational root level in terms of GitLab. So you create the epics there your strategy or business requirements when we create with the business cases and that that level, you will have the strategy and then you split those Epic's into features or capabilities. You have multilevel epics or just Epic's and stories, and you jump from the stories to the teams and the stories are aligned to the epic but assigned to the team.

And that kind of mix is done by management, by splitting the things with the product owner. So you don't delegate that to the team, the priorities and how to organize the work. And that's really, really good because you have this kind of simplicity.

So as a team member, you only see meetings for your team, you would only see task for your team. And you really don't don't take care of the projects and the meetings of the project for the alignment of the projects, because that happens. On the top, so you only see the goals of your team in terms of the balancing of the products.

The missing feature in GitLab and I know the team is working. I've been working with or have some meetings with the team behind the reporting and the and the lean portfolio management capabilities. in Gitlab is reporting because we have some some some some metrics.

And this metrics are more related to the strategic level and probably less to the iteration. But we can have it for all the levels. And basically you will have to look for a strategic.

For a strategy that is more stable than the iteration, but obviously will happen through the Git school, impacts more than what happens within the iteration, so you will have velocity, how much points you can deliver and how are good delivering those plans. The stability is how it vibrates or changes through the iteration, which we expect to be really, really small. How how the business impacts the iteration, the quarter and the year end through the year, we expect more, less instability and more changes because we want that to be effective.

This is not something everybody do. If you have DevOps, probably you don't have to measure this. But the idea behind effectiveness is how good you are, the different things that go to production.

Sometimes most of the things keep those in preproduction environment on a staging environment and they lose effectiveness because you are delivering it. You are producing things that you don't deliver. And the effect density, which is quality, is related to the amount of effects.

At the end The challenges ahead. Ok Growing a plant will make you a farmer, it means that the pilots on Agile are not a good idea. If you are trying to do lean portfolio management, you need to think on all your teams and all the people assigned to the to the to the delivery of this value.

If you start with pilots, probably you will then have problems to integrate everything and make everything work. So you have to think big at the beginning. If you don't implement from the beginning, you have to have a big plan.

And try to keep agile delivery, not only as a tactical, because it is like a small engine that delivers stuff. But you should start thinking on on on how to take business owners to connect with that engine so you can deliver actual value. And the real time information is a Double-Edged sword is it means that if you are good, delivering business will will obviously take advantage of that.

But if you have some technical level, you are not really good for delivering value and you have quality issues because of your vendors or if you have some kind of outsourced model, probably this will make it more transparent that you will have some struggles with that. So take that into account because those are the challenges. The good idea is that lean portfolio management is quite simple and the idea behind layer of portfolio management is to connect an agile engine with the strategy so you can take from the strategy point of view, some advantage on that.

Thank you so much for taking the time to see this presentation. I hope you like it, Alberto Dominguez and hope we can connect in the future.