Focus on Customer Benefits with Lean Portfolio Management
April 9, 2025 | 5 min
More agile, more flexible and always focusing on the customer – these are the challenges that companies have to face. Many companies are increasingly relying on agile or hybrid methods, but the management of the company itself is often excluded from this. This blog post describes Lean Portfolio Management as a proven means of implementing the corporate strategy in a more agile way and focusing on the customers and their needs.
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With the spread of agile methods far beyond software development, many companies are asking themselves how they can become more agile as an organization as a whole. One answer is so-called agile frameworks for agile scaling such as Large Scale Scrum (LeSS), Scrum of Scrums (SoS) or the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe). With the help of these frameworks, companies put themselves in a position to work with agile teams across the board and at all levels. Their “agilization” enables them to react more quickly and flexibly to customer needs and new market conditions. This enables them to remain agile and competitive.
Another challenge that companies have to overcome in their transformation to an agile organization is the agile implementation of their strategy. A company’s strategy is usually translated into numerous initiatives and projects, which are often divided into programs and managed and monitored in a project portfolio.
What Exactly Is Project Portfolio Management?
Project portfolio management (PPM) is the term used when several, often even all, of a company’s projects are managed centrally. This is also known as “Multi-Project Management”, particularly in German-speaking countries. Project portfolio management is intended to ensure that the objectives of all projects contribute to the corporate strategy. In addition, portfolio management serves to monitor the interaction of all projects and prevent additional initiatives from leading to staff overload or exceeding the available financial budget. Furthermore, individual projects are prioritized in the portfolio so that in the event of conflicts it is clear which initiative has priority, e. g. when it comes to resource planning.
While, roughly speaking, project management is about successfully completing an initiative operationally, i. e. “in time, in quality & in budget”, portfolio management always focuses on a large number of projects at the same time. And while program management manages projects with the same content, the project portfolio contains all current and future initiatives. The project portfolio therefore has no end date, whereas a program has an end date.
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Conventional Portfolio Management Is Not Enough
In an agile context, the requirements for portfolio management are changing. It is no longer a question of aligning all initiatives, plans and ongoing projects according to a central, “top-down” strategy and assigning these to the individual divisions, departments and teams for implementation. Instead, agile methods rely on the self-organization of teams, an iterative approach and continuous experimentation. These principles require a high degree of transparency in the company, largely dispense with central control and rely on good coordination and open communication.
One form of agile project portfolio management that has proven itself in practice is Lean Portfolio Management. Lean Management itself is aimed at optimally coordinating all processes that are important for the value chain and eliminating activities that are not relevant as far as possible. This avoids waste and significantly increases product quality and efficiency.
Align Projects with Customer Benefits
A basic principle of lean management is to place the customers and their needs at the center of all decisions. To this end, the company must identify and evaluate corresponding value streams (value-adding processes): initiatives that promote customer value are driven forward accordingly, while other projects are eliminated or realigned. Another basic principle that many will be familiar with from the Kanban method is the pull principle: activities and tasks are “pulled” from the previous process phase in the individual stages as soon as they can be processed. They are not “pushed” into the following process step. In addition, lean management strives for perfection and demands continuous improvements in the individual process steps. The central paradigm of lean thinking is the avoidance of waste in all its forms.
Lean Portfolio Management
Applied to project portfolio management, the Lean approach offers companies numerous advantages. Lean Portfolio Management closes the gap between corporate strategy and the management of project portfolios. At the same time, it is a link between traditional and agile project management methods and thus reflects the prevailing hybrid corporate reality.
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Implementation of Lean Portfolio Management
Customer benefit has top priority
All of a company’s current and future projects are collected in the portfolio. In a first step, all initiatives are examined to determine whether they create or increase value for the customer. A value is usually a product or service. If the project does not contribute directly or indirectly to increasing customer benefit, it should be discontinued or realigned. Suitable initiatives are prioritized according to their value for the customer benefit.
Lean planning and evaluation of new initiatives
In order to start new initiatives, extensive documentation is required in conventional PPM. This contradicts the lean approach: when applying for new projects, known as epics in the lean context, there should be no waste in the form of unnecessary and time-consuming documentation. Only really important information that can be used to evaluate the epic must be compiled. This also applies to the planning of the epic itself.
Quickly achievable project goals
Where possible, short feedback cycles with more frequent deliveries should replace projects with long durations. In this way, value creation takes place at shorter intervals. A portfolio roadmap provides a quick overview of when which epics start and end.
Lean budgets
Company resources are allocated to the individual value streams and the epics grouped within them. Simple plan/actual comparisons and earned value analyses (EVA) help to manage costs efficiently.
Portfolio Kanban
The portfolio epics are structured into different phases and visualized on a Kanban board, for example. This also facilitates the implementation of the pull principle so that, for example, the epics can only enter a new phase when the employees involved have free capacity to do so. Likewise, new epics can only be started if the project participants in the first phase are available and actively pull this new initiative towards them.
Improvement through retrospective
As is usual with agile methods, a retrospective is held at the end of a project to analyze what went well and what went badly and what opportunities for improvement there are.
Conclusion
Lean Portfolio Management is a proven method for planning and managing different projects and epics with as little effort as possible. By prioritizing and aligning individual initiatives with customer benefits, short feedback loops and streamlining the administrative part to what is necessary, companies can increase the quality of their products and services and thus customer satisfaction, while at the same time operating more efficiently. The organization can react more quickly to new framework conditions and benefits from a short time-to-market and optimized value creation.
About the Author
Christian Schneider, Content Marketing, cplace
With its Next-Generation Project and Portfolio Management technology, cplace is revolutionizing and transforming the way people and organizations collaborate on complex projects. The flexible software platform enables leading companies to create customized solutions for digital transformation and developing complex products.
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