Our July Last Thursdays with SPM webinar featured Agile Evangelist, Fred Champlain, who led an engaging conversation with Debbra McGrath on the use of SAFe Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) to manage digital transformation. If you missed the live session, you can watch the recording and all past episodes on our Last Thursdays with SPM playlist.
Fred joined the webinar live from the Agile 2023 Conference in sunny Orlando and opened by sharing insight on current market trends such as the maturation across-the-board of agile implementations as well as portfolio development.
Then, Debbra and Fred began a discussion of how ServiceNow Agile workflows are enabling the big picture view; how companies have adopted agile processes; and how they are moving from teams of teams and recognizing need for portfolio - all while adapting to create business agility and greater customer centricity.
Fred shared how ServiceNow supports Portfolio SAFe and LPM by looking at the end-to-end process: strategize, align, and deliver. This includes alignment of investments and resources to strategy (Goals and OKRs) to ensure teams are working on shared priorities and executing on a common cadence to be in sync across the enterprise (to understand what they are doing and when). LPM enables companies to sense, respond, and adapt to deliver value –in a customer centric way- in rapidly changing markets and ever-increasing and changing expectations of customers – and how all of this is critical to scaling.
We touched on the importance of Enterprise Architecture, including Application Portfolio Management (APM) and business capability planning, as well as the central demand pipeline covering intake/demand and Digital Portfolio Management (DPM) which creates visibility into dependencies and architectural runway. LPM realizes strategy by bringing together adaptive investment funding, lean operations, and governance together to deliver value - typically on at least a quarterly basis.
Fred dug deep into how continuous planning and prioritization is critical to keeping processes on track, and he provided guidance on how to handle the impact of accelerated release cycles with frequent delivery of minimum marketable features (MMFs) in the continuous delivery pipeline. SPM enables streamlined delivery using any methodology, supporting bi-directional integration with common development tools, and leveraging a Unified backlog of all work.
We wrapped up the webinar with a look at exciting upcoming capabilities such as Product Feedback and Gen AI + SPM, and how they will further automate processes; enable greater productivity; and enhance our customer centric mindset to drive customer value.
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Next webinar: On Thursday, August 31, we will be welcoming back Erin Roberts, Sr. Solution Consultant, as well as Chris Cannella, Manager, Inbound Product Management, to learn about the latest Resource Management functionality and what’s planned for Vancouver release. Be sure to secure your spot here.
See you at our next Last Thursdays!
Jon Lim and Debbra McGrath
