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On the journey to enterprise agility

BySarah Adams

In late October, Alluvial delivered our first Certified Agile VMO Practitioner® course with our partners at LitheSpeed. LitheSpeed wrote the book ‘From PMO to VMO: Managing for Value Delivery’ and developed this course to teach the fundamentals of value management and how to support enterprise agility. Alluvial is now certified to teach this course and the next course runs in early February 2025.

Enterprise agility: where do I start? Right where you are!

Throughout the course, we talk about the three traverses in the journey to enterprise agility. To be truly agile, an organization must traverse through team agility, to portfolio agility, and then to strategic agility. The journey is not linear and you can start where you are.

  • Overall, one of the best places to start is ‘Establish lean portfolio management’ on the traverse to portfolio agility. This step makes the work within your portfolio visible, provides a shared view of current reality, and supports scenario planning. If you set up a ‘Portfolio Kanban’ and a ‘Flight Deck’ board, you can often improve the quality of decision-making within your organization.
  • If your organization is working on the traverse to team agility, a critical place to focus is ‘instill excellence in execution’. In our work with clients, we have found that teams often need to examine their development processes in detail and look for opportunities to remove impediments and improve specific practices. Even if your teams are well-established, it is important to regularly go back to the fundamentals of ‘excellence in execution’. Having frank conversations about the work can often lead to measurable improvements in velocity and quality.
  • On the traverse to strategic agility, ‘establish flexible funding’ is the cornerstone. Many organizations are stuck with project-based funding and long planning cycles. To achieve strategic agility, you need the ability to adjust priorities regularly and the flexibility to re-allocate resources across your portfolio to meet business needs.

Alluvial and LitheSpeed are working on a VMO assessment tool to clarify an organization’s current reality and to identify next actions.

  • To learn more about this VMO assessment tool, please connect with us. We can also walk you through examples of visual portfolio management in action.
  • You can become a Certified Agile VMO Practitioner®. This two-day course run on 04-05 February 2025 and 18-19 April 2025.
  • For an overview of portfolio management, you can join our ‘Concepts of Portfolio Management’, a 2.5 hour mini-course on 17 January 2025.