Created: 21 February 2022

Should You Take a Course? An Overview of Lean Portfolio Management

Are LPM or Lean Portfolio Management courses right for you? Here's everything you need to know about LPM and how it might fit into your career goals.

About 80% of managers admit that they can’t run a project without portfolio management. Company executives realize that you need more than a strategy to run a successful business.

The rapid changes in e-commerce demand agility in businesses. More and more managers seek greater business acumen to keep up with modern trends.

There has been a rise in interest in online courses like lean portfolio management.
This is especially common in software development companies.

Keep reading this article to get an insightful overview of lean portfolio management.

What Is Lean Portfolio Management?

Most companies have already figured out how to develop efficient business strategies. Top businesses have an entire department dedicated to the optimization of product development.

However, there seems to be a disconnect between the strategy and its implementation. Managers find it hard to oversee the implementation of the optimal strategy as planned.

This is why many executives are taking up courses in Lean Portfolio Management. The coursework aims at teaching lean principles to connect strategy to execution. You’ll learn how to pace your business strategies with flexible techniques.

The main course objective is to optimize the management of investment portfolios. By doing so, you'll be able to identify the most profitable opportunities and maximize them. This goes a long way in helping you reach your end goal of delivering high-quality products in the marketplace.

Besides, the course aims at helping you strike a balance between quantity and quality. You’ll look at how you can use the portfolio’s budget to deliver both to the client.

Implementing LPM differs from other portfolio management styles in many ways. First, it aims at sending work to the people and not the other way around. Thus, remote work enables the completion of goals in a much shorter time.

Secondly, it focuses on producing quality rather than the number of products. So you will learn how to define value in your specific business, then learn how to create that value and deliver it to clients.

Lean portfolio managers learn how to divide their employees into smaller teams effectively. Each team works on a small part of the project. You dissolve the teams once the project is complete.

Besides, LPM encourages the review of budgets after every quarter instead of the conventional once a year. The review system makes it easy to control the portfolio budget.

How Lean Portfolio Management Has Evolved

In the business world, Project Management has changed in so many ways over time. The top team has full control over the expenditure in lean portfolio management.

They use the funding to accomplish what they deem the most important at the time. A lean portfolio manager aims at timely delivery. Fast responsiveness is one of the key outcomes of lean portfolio management competency.

Why Lean Portfolio Management?

When working on a huge project, the team might get lost in chasing deadlines. Their focus tends to shift from delivering value to producing a ton of work by a set time.

LPM aims at improving the product value through small stages. Therefore, your team doesn't have to feel like chasing a never-ending goal.

Elements of Lean Portfolio Management

You will achieve lean portfolio management by upholding its principles. Elimination of waste is an area more businesses should pay attention to. Waste is anything that doesn’t add value to the final product.

Lean portfolio managers avoid this waste by eliminating habits such as task switching. Besides, completing one project before moving to the next ensures that your team doesn't have any pending work.

So to keep up with the agility of the portfolio management style, you’ll learn how to train employees. This is because they will need to take in new information fast. Thus, managers learn iteration techniques and the importance of continuous testing.

Another key principle of lean portfolio management is to decide late. Late, in this case, implies that you will delay the decision until the last possible moment.

There is always a certain degree of uncertainty, especially with big decisions. Hence, it's much safer to announce when you are more informed on the topic.

Another principle of lean portfolio management is speedy results. In business, it's better to complete a task quickly and then address the defects later than to do it slowly and have less time to correct the task.

A key element of lean portfolio management is the freedom awarded to employees. The lean portfolio managers allow employees to apply their skills as they deem fit as long as the primary goal is achieved.

Implementing Lean Portfolio Management

Implementing the lean principles into your management style will take quite some time. The employee will take a while before adjusting to the changes. But the wait will be worthwhile in the end.

You’ll need to create a management team that will oversee the execution of the lean principles. Besides, implementing lean portfolio management will change the way you handle funding.

Investors will allocate funds to the team overseeing the project. So there will be a visible accountability chain of how the funds are being utilized. The implementation strategy makes teams more accountable for the funds.

Moreover, you’ll have to foster flexibility and freedom among teams. This results in much more creative models. Therefore, the team can come up with relatable yet practical solutions.

Lean Portfolio Management

Portfolio management has its distinct challenges in the modern business world. The ever-changing technology trends create problems that demand fast and flexible solutions.

To succeed in business, you’ll need to learn how to manage your portfolios efficiently. Take an online course on lean portfolio management to acquire the necessary skills to create flexible models. This will make you more qualified for better management positions.

The course teaches key principles that lay the foundation for your strategy models. At first, your team may find it hard to adapt to the new principles. With enough consistency, you’ll achieve lean portfolio management competency.

Contact us today for any portfolio management needs.