Review: An Introduction to Evidence-Based Portfolio Management

Author: Henny Portman

Scrum.org wrote the whitepaper An Introduction to Evidence-Based Portfolio Management. Evidence-Based Portfolio Management is an approach that applies lean and agile principles to the challenge of deciding where to invest to derive the greatest business benefit.

It enables organizations to quickly test ideas by actually building and validating the smallest solution that will deliver a single outcome to a single set of customers or users.

Evidence-Based Portfolio Management takes a Principles Based Approach:

Separate capacity-for-growth from focus-of-work
Make the best decision you can, based on the best evidence available
Invest in improving business impacts using hypotheses, don’t just fund activity
Continuously (re)evaluate and (re)order opportunities
Minimize avoidable loss
Let teams pull work as they have capacity
Improve status reporting with increased engagement and transparency.

To download the QRC: QRC E-B PfM

Evidence-Based Portfolio Management focusses on outcomes to produce better results. It states that the organizational mission, vision, outcomes, and strategy must be centralized, and the product vision, strategy, and execution must be decentralized.

The art of portfolio management is deciding what not to work on and the number of teams you have will limit how many ideas you can work on at once.

To download the whitepaper: An Introduction to Evidence-Based Portfolio Management

This framework fits in the Portfolio level block of my bird’s eye view on the agile frameworks forest (see also the complete article).