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A few weeks ago, I was for a three-day assessment training regarding the IPMA Project Excellence Model in Vilnius, Lithonia. For 3 days, by using action learning we familiarized ourselves with the Project Excellence Model. This model will be used to judge which large and mega-sized projects will receive the project excellence award. The Project Excellence Model (PEM) is described in the book Project Excellence Baseline for Achieving Excellence in Projects and Programmes. MORE
The Business Technology Standard (or BT Standard, 4th edition) is an open-source management framework to plan, build and run information technology in today’s technology-driven business world. MORE
2019 was again a fruitful book review year. I wrote around 40 book reviews including corresponding quick reference cards and several personal insights, and views on specific topics in the field of project, program and portfolio management. Agility. Agile zoals het bedoeld is. MORE
Agile Conversations – Transform Your Conversations, Transform your Culture , written by Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick could be one of the missing pieces to make your agile transition work. The book starts with some background information regarding the ideas and theories that underpin the conversational tools that will be used in the rest of the book. You get an explanation of the core techniques of the authors’ four R’s method. MORE
This guide (2017) is a result of the working group of the Association for Project Management’s Assurance Special Interest group (APM’s Assurance SIG). The guide addresses assurance in relation to the areas that are considered the fundamental aspects (and key differences form traditional waterfall approach) of agile project management and assurance. MORE
The book 97 Things Every Scrum Practitioner Should Know edited by Gunther Verheyen contains the wisdom of 69 practitioners around the world and helps you to improve your understanding of Scrum ( nb. Who are we missing on the cover of the book? ). Gunther organized these 97 essays around ten themes. These themes cover all aspects of Scrum and beyond. The events, the different roles, their behavior, the skills, collaboration and the artifacts. The book ends with a simple Scrum glossary. MORE
If you want to make the transformation to a self-managing organization the book Moose heads on the table – Stories about self-managing organisations from Sweden by Karin Tenelius and Lisa Gill is a good starting point. MORE
I just finished the draft version for the second print of my book Scaling agile in organizaties (in Dutch) and I counted 65 frameworks and approaches (25 more than the first print). I thought I covered all, but I found a few new ones. MORE
The quest to find more trees for my agile forest continues. Structural Agility is again a way of working that fits in the culture targeted box of my The bird’s eye view on the agile forest overview and complements ‘frameworks’ like Scrum, SAFe, Less, disciplined Agile, et cetera. MORE
Quite often you hear the words blockchain, bitcoin or cryptocurrency, but do you really know what is meant with those words? Tiana Laurence wrote the book Introduction to Blockchain Technology – The many faces of blockchain technology in the 21 st century to demystify these words. MORE
With the book True lean – Your guide to the fundamentals connecting purpose, process and people written by Rudy Gort you get a concise but complete and clear overview of and insight into lean. What is it, what can you do with it and how did it come about? The book is divided into three parts. The first part examines the origin of lean in order to understand the philosophy behind lean. MORE
Portfolio Management – A practical guide is a publication from the APM Portfolio Management specific Interest Group written by Steve Leary, Richard Moor, Marina Morillas Lara, Stephen Parrett, Lynne Ratcliffe and Adam Skinner. MORE
During training classes I often notice that students mix these words together. After reading this article I hope you understand the relationship between incremental and iterative development. I will start with a comparison of a waterfall and an agile approach by delivering a payment app. In the second part of this article, I position waterfall and agile in an incremental versus iterative cross or matrix and shows what happens in the other two quadrants too (will be part of a next blog post). MORE
Every two years the Standish Group publish a new CHAOS Report. These reports include classic CHAOS data in different forms with many charts. Most of the charts come from the CHAOS database of over 50,000 in-depth project profiles of the previous 5 years. MORE
My quest continues. The Business Agility model is the next one to add to my Bird’s eye view on the agile forest. MORE
Rethinking agile – Why agile teams have nothing to do with business agility written by Klaus Leopold is great book to cope with agile transformations and what you have to do to increase the chance of success. It definitely busted the myth that having agile teams makes you agile. The book is divided into four parts: the problem, the causes, the first solution, and the result. The book starts with a case study of an organization that wants to optimize their time-to-market. MORE
My quest continues and continues. The Digital Fluency model is the next one to add to my Bird’s eye view on the agile forest article (thanks to Zaher Alhaj). Digital Fluency is about achieving what is required for your specific needs and goals and recognizing the importance of continually investing and evolving with your business and customers. MORE
The 10X Growth Machine – How companies can innovate, scale and win , written by Misha de Sterke, is a book to build your own growth machine by using innovation as a means. It offers a very detailed description of a battle-tested methodology with a framework, a canvas, seven models and eleven tools. MORE
The book Leading the transformation – Applying agile and DevOps principles at scale written by Gary Gruver and Tommy Mouser gives a refreshing look how to start your agility transformation. MORE
Jurriaan Kamer and Rini van Solingen are the authors of Formula X – How to reach extreme acceleration in your organization? It’s a business fable that shows which steps you should take to drastically accelerate the time-to-market in your own organization. In this novel, we follow Ronald Verhulst, the director of a major kitchen manufacturer who is confronted with an advertisement, placed by the major shareholder promising that kitchens can be operational within two weeks from order. MORE
Michael K. Levine wrote with People Over Process – Leadership for Agility a very pragmatic and down to earth book about leadership and agile projects. The classic formulation of agile in the Agile Manifesto has no role for leadership. In fact, it is explicitly anti-leadership, encouraging self-managed teams, reliance on motivated individuals, leaving them alone and trusting them to get the job done. MORE
The first post in 2020 is again a post about an agile framework. The forest is still growing and this will not be the last one. The next one is already under review too. MORE
In January 2019 I published a blog about Evidence-Based Management. When I spoke at the Agile Tour 2019 in Vilnius, Lithuania, I met, among others, Magdalena Firlit as one of the other speakers. She mentioned a card deck she developed to support her classes regarding Evidence-Based Management. I just received some copies of that deck (really appreciated). MORE
One of the principles of the Agile Manifesto is “ Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential ”. Studies from the Standish Group and recorded in one of their Chaos reports shows that 60% of developed features are not or rarely used. If you only deliver the right features your customer will get the product much faster and cheaper. Looking at the features of the product you are developing is one way to take this principle into account. MORE
It looks like my forest is changing into a jungle. This time I added Agile PM 2. Agile PM 2 is an extension of PM 2 (initiative of the European Union, see: [link] ). To be honest I have some problems with this initiative. MORE
I provided book reviews for all eight issues of a Dutch Project Management Magazine (Vakblad Projectmanagement). I used, for these eight reviews, book reviews that I wrote for this blog and www.managementboek.nl. MORE
Happy to see that the Project Management World Journal (PMWJ) published my article: Portman, H. 2020). Are incremental and iterative the same phenomenon or not? PM World Journal , Vol. IX, Issue IV, April. MORE
Happy to see that my white paper Exploring the delta in AgileSHIFT is now live on the AXELOS content hub. Enterprise agility is key. It is not just about implementing an agile way of working in your IT department but a transformation for your whole organization. You have to understand where the market is going, where your competitors are moving, where your customers want to be, and, as a result, where your organization needs to be. One technique to understand this is the concept of the delta. MORE
Many organizations are struggling with their business agility transformation. One of the reasons is the way they have organized their teams. The focus was probably on efficiency and if these teams start to use agile ways of working, this doesn’t make the organization agile. MORE
DevOps for the modern enterprise – winning practices to transform legacy IT organizations is a practical book based on the experience of the author Mirco Hering. The book is divided into three parts. The first part explains how to create the right ecosystem for success. MORE
If you look at the AgilePM (The DSDM Agile Project Framework) documentation set-up you could ask yourself if it’s not too much for an agile way of working? In AgilePM the following documents are described: Terms of Reference. Business Case. Prioritised Requirements List. Solution Architecture Definition. Development Approach Definition. Delivery Plan. Management Approach Definition. Feasibility Assessment. Foundation Summary. Evolving Solution. Timebox Plan. Timebox Review Record. MORE
Proud to see that the PM World Journal published a next article that I wrote together with Marisa Silva. As you might recall, last year we (Marisa Silva and myself) went on a safari to hunt the project creatures that could negatively impact a portfolio of projects [ Silva, M. and Portman, H. 2019). MORE
The Agile Fluency model, developed by Diana Larsen and James Shore in 2012 and substantially updated in 2018, is a framework to help teams understand their current position and to help them develop an individual road map. Agile teams pass through four distinct zones of fluency as they learn ( fluency evolves). Diana Larsen defines fluency as things that you do automatically without thinking. Each zone brings specific benefits: Focusing teams produce business value (agile fundamentals). MORE
AIPMO is developing the first ‘leading’ international PMO standard based on a combination of research findings and expert knowledge. MORE
Henny Portman
SEPTEMBER 25, 2020
Agile Conversations – Transform Your Conversations, Transform your Culture , written by Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick could be one of the missing pieces to make your agile transition work. The book starts with some background information regarding the ideas and theories that underpin the conversational tools that will be used in the rest of the book. You get an explanation of the core techniques of the authors’ four R’s method.
Henny Portman
SEPTEMBER 9, 2020
If you want to make the transformation to a self-managing organization the book Moose heads on the table – Stories about self-managing organisations from Sweden by Karin Tenelius and Lisa Gill is a good starting point.
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Henny Portman
FEBRUARY 22, 2020
AIPMO is developing the first ‘leading’ international PMO standard based on a combination of research findings and expert knowledge.
Henny Portman
MAY 25, 2020
Many organizations are struggling with their business agility transformation. One of the reasons is the way they have organized their teams. The focus was probably on efficiency and if these teams start to use agile ways of working, this doesn’t make the organization agile.
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How can project planning that stretches over months or years remain relevant and account for new ad-hoc activities that arrive every day?
Henny Portman
SEPTEMBER 7, 2020
Proud to see that the PM World Journal published a next article that I wrote together with Marisa Silva. As you might recall, last year we (Marisa Silva and myself) went on a safari to hunt the project creatures that could negatively impact a portfolio of projects [ Silva, M. and Portman, H. 2019).
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Henny Portman
SEPTEMBER 3, 2020
Quite often you hear the words blockchain, bitcoin or cryptocurrency, but do you really know what is meant with those words? Tiana Laurence wrote the book Introduction to Blockchain Technology – The many faces of blockchain technology in the 21 st century to demystify these words.
Henny Portman
JULY 26, 2020
Michael K. Levine wrote with People Over Process – Leadership for Agility a very pragmatic and down to earth book about leadership and agile projects. The classic formulation of agile in the Agile Manifesto has no role for leadership. In fact, it is explicitly anti-leadership, encouraging self-managed teams, reliance on motivated individuals, leaving them alone and trusting them to get the job done.
Henny Portman
MARCH 24, 2020
A few weeks ago, I was for a three-day assessment training regarding the IPMA Project Excellence Model in Vilnius, Lithonia. For 3 days, by using action learning we familiarized ourselves with the Project Excellence Model. This model will be used to judge which large and mega-sized projects will receive the project excellence award. The Project Excellence Model (PEM) is described in the book Project Excellence Baseline for Achieving Excellence in Projects and Programmes.
Henny Portman
MAY 29, 2020
It looks like my forest is changing into a jungle. This time I added Agile PM 2. Agile PM 2 is an extension of PM 2 (initiative of the European Union, see: [link] ). To be honest I have some problems with this initiative.
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This eBook describes the process of managing the project budget and its associated costs.
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Henny Portman
APRIL 3, 2020
The 10X Growth Machine – How companies can innovate, scale and win , written by Misha de Sterke, is a book to build your own growth machine by using innovation as a means. It offers a very detailed description of a battle-tested methodology with a framework, a canvas, seven models and eleven tools.
Henny Portman
JULY 5, 2020
The book Leading the transformation – Applying agile and DevOps principles at scale written by Gary Gruver and Tommy Mouser gives a refreshing look how to start your agility transformation.
Henny Portman
NOVEMBER 30, 2019
Portfolio Management – A practical guide is a publication from the APM Portfolio Management specific Interest Group written by Steve Leary, Richard Moor, Marina Morillas Lara, Stephen Parrett, Lynne Ratcliffe and Adam Skinner.
Henny Portman
APRIL 15, 2020
My quest continues. The Business Agility model is the next one to add to my Bird’s eye view on the agile forest.
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Henny Portman
APRIL 7, 2020
Happy to see that the Project Management World Journal (PMWJ) published my article: Portman, H. 2020). Are incremental and iterative the same phenomenon or not? PM World Journal , Vol. IX, Issue IV, April.
Henny Portman
APRIL 28, 2020
Rethinking agile – Why agile teams have nothing to do with business agility written by Klaus Leopold is great book to cope with agile transformations and what you have to do to increase the chance of success. It definitely busted the myth that having agile teams makes you agile. The book is divided into four parts: the problem, the causes, the first solution, and the result. The book starts with a case study of an organization that wants to optimize their time-to-market.
Henny Portman
APRIL 1, 2020
One of the principles of the Agile Manifesto is “ Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential ”. Studies from the Standish Group and recorded in one of their Chaos reports shows that 60% of developed features are not or rarely used. If you only deliver the right features your customer will get the product much faster and cheaper. Looking at the features of the product you are developing is one way to take this principle into account.
Henny Portman
DECEMBER 31, 2019
I just finished the draft version for the second print of my book Scaling agile in organizaties (in Dutch) and I counted 65 frameworks and approaches (25 more than the first print). I thought I covered all, but I found a few new ones.
Speaker: Luke Freiler, CEO and co-founder of Centercode
After weathering recessions with a wide range of iconic customers, CEO and Product Manager Luke Freiler has seen first hand the impact the Voice of the Customer has had in making or breaking tech companies during hard times. He's going to walk you through an agile process for continuous customer testing that saves you time and gives you full confidence in your products — no matter how many you're sending out the door this year.
Henny Portman
JUNE 6, 2020
The book 97 Things Every Scrum Practitioner Should Know edited by Gunther Verheyen contains the wisdom of 69 practitioners around the world and helps you to improve your understanding of Scrum ( nb. Who are we missing on the cover of the book? ). Gunther organized these 97 essays around ten themes. These themes cover all aspects of Scrum and beyond. The events, the different roles, their behavior, the skills, collaboration and the artifacts. The book ends with a simple Scrum glossary.
Henny Portman
AUGUST 1, 2020
The quest to find more trees for my agile forest continues. Structural Agility is again a way of working that fits in the culture targeted box of my The bird’s eye view on the agile forest overview and complements ‘frameworks’ like Scrum, SAFe, Less, disciplined Agile, et cetera.
Henny Portman
JANUARY 31, 2020
The Business Technology Standard (or BT Standard, 4th edition) is an open-source management framework to plan, build and run information technology in today’s technology-driven business world.
Henny Portman
MARCH 17, 2020
During training classes I often notice that students mix these words together. After reading this article I hope you understand the relationship between incremental and iterative development. I will start with a comparison of a waterfall and an agile approach by delivering a payment app. In the second part of this article, I position waterfall and agile in an incremental versus iterative cross or matrix and shows what happens in the other two quadrants too (will be part of a next blog post).
Speaker: Peter Taylor, Speaker & Author of The Lazy Project Manager
Social Collaborative Management aims at delivering, at the enterprise level, a common goal for the business while harnessing the performance advantages of a collaborative community. This is a vital paradigm shift that many organisations are trying to understand right now - balancing traditional work and centralised leadership against the value of decentralised teams and trust. But the principles of harnessing collective power, collaboration, and community build an underlying ‘constant change’ capability that is critical in today’s new work environment.
Henny Portman
FEBRUARY 6, 2020
I provided book reviews for all eight issues of a Dutch Project Management Magazine (Vakblad Projectmanagement). I used, for these eight reviews, book reviews that I wrote for this blog and www.managementboek.nl.
Henny Portman
APRIL 9, 2019
If you look at the AgilePM (The DSDM Agile Project Framework) documentation set-up you could ask yourself if it’s not too much for an agile way of working? In AgilePM the following documents are described: Terms of Reference. Business Case. Prioritised Requirements List. Solution Architecture Definition. Development Approach Definition. Delivery Plan. Management Approach Definition. Feasibility Assessment. Foundation Summary. Evolving Solution. Timebox Plan. Timebox Review Record.
Henny Portman
MARCH 18, 2020
Happy to see that my white paper Exploring the delta in AgileSHIFT is now live on the AXELOS content hub. Enterprise agility is key. It is not just about implementing an agile way of working in your IT department but a transformation for your whole organization. You have to understand where the market is going, where your competitors are moving, where your customers want to be, and, as a result, where your organization needs to be. One technique to understand this is the concept of the delta.
Henny Portman
JULY 17, 2020
With the book True lean – Your guide to the fundamentals connecting purpose, process and people written by Rudy Gort you get a concise but complete and clear overview of and insight into lean. What is it, what can you do with it and how did it come about? The book is divided into three parts. The first part examines the origin of lean in order to understand the philosophy behind lean.
Speaker: Hope Gurion, Product Leader Coach, Fearless Product LLC
Customer discovery is the lifeblood of product teams to identify the most important customer needs to solve next. Often it's the Product and UX members of the trio who take lead on facilitating this discovery. But what about other customer-facing teams in an organization? How do product teams best partner with these teams to understand customers’ unmet needs and decide which needs to address next?
Henny Portman
MAY 11, 2020
My quest continues and continues. The Digital Fluency model is the next one to add to my Bird’s eye view on the agile forest article (thanks to Zaher Alhaj). Digital Fluency is about achieving what is required for your specific needs and goals and recognizing the importance of continually investing and evolving with your business and customers.
Henny Portman
MAY 30, 2019
The Agile Fluency model, developed by Diana Larsen and James Shore in 2012 and substantially updated in 2018, is a framework to help teams understand their current position and to help them develop an individual road map. Agile teams pass through four distinct zones of fluency as they learn ( fluency evolves). Diana Larsen defines fluency as things that you do automatically without thinking. Each zone brings specific benefits: Focusing teams produce business value (agile fundamentals).
Henny Portman
JANUARY 2, 2020
The first post in 2020 is again a post about an agile framework. The forest is still growing and this will not be the last one. The next one is already under review too.
Henny Portman
MARCH 16, 2020
Jurriaan Kamer and Rini van Solingen are the authors of Formula X – How to reach extreme acceleration in your organization? It’s a business fable that shows which steps you should take to drastically accelerate the time-to-market in your own organization. In this novel, we follow Ronald Verhulst, the director of a major kitchen manufacturer who is confronted with an advertisement, placed by the major shareholder promising that kitchens can be operational within two weeks from order.
Speaker: Greg Coticchia, CEO & Founder of ENTRA
Organizations of all types and sizes are facing common challenges of how to deal with the uncertainty in our current professional and personal lives. How can you plan when you are uncertain of what's next? On a product level, how can you be sure of delivering the ‘right’ messaging, products, solutions, and services to customers? How do you survive to fight the fight another day? In this session, we will discuss important tips for you as a Product Manager dealing with uncertainty. At the same time, we will discuss another important aspect of dealing with uncertainty, and that is building trust, especially while many of us are working remotely or in new or different settings.
Henny Portman
SEPTEMBER 23, 2019
This guide (2017) is a result of the working group of the Association for Project Management’s Assurance Special Interest group (APM’s Assurance SIG). The guide addresses assurance in relation to the areas that are considered the fundamental aspects (and key differences form traditional waterfall approach) of agile project management and assurance.
Henny Portman
JANUARY 3, 2020
Every two years the Standish Group publish a new CHAOS Report. These reports include classic CHAOS data in different forms with many charts. Most of the charts come from the CHAOS database of over 50,000 in-depth project profiles of the previous 5 years.
Henny Portman
JUNE 2, 2020
In January 2019 I published a blog about Evidence-Based Management. When I spoke at the Agile Tour 2019 in Vilnius, Lithuania, I met, among others, Magdalena Firlit as one of the other speakers. She mentioned a card deck she developed to support her classes regarding Evidence-Based Management. I just received some copies of that deck (really appreciated).
Henny Portman
DECEMBER 27, 2019
2019 was again a fruitful book review year. I wrote around 40 book reviews including corresponding quick reference cards and several personal insights, and views on specific topics in the field of project, program and portfolio management. Agility. Agile zoals het bedoeld is.
Speaker: Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant, Rothman Consulting Group
Many of us are accustomed to planning for either discovery or delivery. We know how to plan for where we want to be for a product (delivery). And, we know how to plan to discover a market (discovery). Right now in 2020, those plans might not be worth anything. The world is still in upheaval—and no one has a crystal ball to know when we should plan more in-depth. Instead of planning for either discovery or delivery, we can use experiments—for all our work. When we focus on experimentation, small bets, and short feedback loops, we can create the kinds of products our customers will love.
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