In brief

Centric is an IT service provider with a significant market share in the public sector. Centric Public Sector Solutions is an organizational unit with more than 800 employees, responsible for all services for the public sector. Centric and Prowareness Xeleron have jointly invested heavily in recent years in increasing the agility of their organization at team and department level.

Centric wants to be able to steer even more sharply on the initiatives in the portfolio, including with clear business cases. In addition, a total overview of all the various portfolios and roadmaps was lacking. Lean Portfolio Management from SAFe offered the tools to get a grip on these challenges. For this, we trained the employees involved, set up processes and tools and guided the management and portfolio management team in a period of 9 months. By setting up and guiding a Value Management Office (VMO), the new portfolio management process is secured in the organization.

About Centric
Centric is a Dutch IT company that specializes in delivering software solutions and IT services to various sectors. The company serves government institutions, financial services providers, healthcare organizations and companies in the retail and logistics sector. With more than 4000 employees, Centric is a significant company. Their services include software development, IT consultancy, system integration, cloud solutions and managed services.

The challenge and approach

Centric is an organization that has grown through acquisitions and takeovers. PSS is the domain within Centric that is responsible for all services that Centric provides to the Public sector. Most important customers are almost all municipalities in the Netherlands that purchase one or more services.

The past two years have seen investments in making the teams and business units of PSS more agile. The various business units are highly autonomous and also have their own P&L responsibility. At the same time, there was a need for more control over the business units. A business unit has three important sources of work. Firstly, the operational activities, whether or not initiated by the customer. Secondly, each business unit has its own innovation calendar to improve or develop the products and services in that business unit. Thirdly, the central strategy of PSS is an important source. This strategy has been shaped by means of an OGSM, which in turn cascades to the various business units.

The biggest challenge for all business units was prioritizing across the three sources of work. The goal of setting up portfolio management was to manage the change agenda (own innovation and from the central strategy) more explicitly. They wanted to prioritize more explicitly, to steer more on business cases, to be able to weigh central and local interests better and thus to better bring forward the business importance of initiatives in the portfolio.

The client for this change process is the Operational Director of Centric PSS.

From strategy to realization in 5 steps

All business units have been transformed over the past two years to agile working at the level of teams and agile release trains, mainly using the SAFe framework. In order to connect to this, the standard implementation approach of Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) was used as much as possible for this organizational development process. This approach consists of five steps, which were carried out somewhat sequentially. The entire process was carried out by an LPM working group, and supervised and supported by Prowareness Xeleron. The last step in the diagram (Measure and Grow) concerns the continuous improvement cycle and was outside the scope of this process.

The main stages are, in sequence:

1. Align.The first step consisted of training the LPM working group, formulating the change strategy, scoping the portfolio management process, identifying key roles and kicking off the trajectory.
2. Organize.This step consisted of mapping the various operational and development value streams within PSS with the LPM working group. In addition, the current portfolio was mapped, all necessary meetings were planned and a design was made for the Kanban portfolio.
3. Strategize.This third step consisted of translating the OGSM to the portfolio, a translation was made from the product portfolio to the portfolio, the first Epics were formulated and strategy sessions were held to arrive at an improved OGSM. Finances were deliberately left out of the picture in this phase so as not to increase the complexity further.
4. Operate. In this phase, PSS has started implementing the new portfolio management process. In this, the portfolio team, consisting of all business unit managers, architecture, the portfolio manager and the LPM working group, was created. They meet monthly to discuss the work in the portfolio kanban (funnel) and to make decisions. Furthermore, the first Epic Owners were guided in the correct execution of their role.
5. Govern. With the arrival of the VMO, the final step was then initiated. After a period of 9 months, this organizational development process was completed and secured in the VMO. As a result, the existing organization is now able to further guide and develop the portfolio management process. In addition, the organization is examining how the portfolios of PSS and the business units can better align, and it is being assessed to what extent portfolio management tools can further support the process.

For steps one through three, the organization took approximately 4 months to complete. After this, they moved on to implementing the new portfolio management process.

Two crucial change groups

With the launch of the new portfolio management process, two important management teams have been set up:

1. LPM working group (or Transformation team or Leading coalition). This is the transformation team that was responsible for the entire start-up, design and implementation of the new portfolio management process. This was a multidisciplinary team of employees from the Centric organization, supported by Prowareness Xeleron. The composition was chosen in such a way that the team was able to independently look at the process both holistically and in detail. In addition, it concerned a broad representation from the portfolio process and the employees characterized themselves as early adopters. Once every two weeks, the management sat down to make decisions on the new process, the approach and to strengthen the mandate of this group.
2. The Portfolio team. Mandated to make decisions on the entire portfolio of PSS and met monthly in the portfolio sync. This team consisted of a broad representation of all crucial roles in the portfolio. Think of the IT architect, CTO, business representatives and the VMO. Furthermore, the Epic Owners from the organization joined if this was necessary. The goal of this team is to:
   1. To be critical of the initiatives in the portfolio kanban and discard them or downgrade them in priority.
   2. Assess an initiative from both a business and technology perspective.
   3. Making decisions about moving an initiative to the next phase.
   4. Escalate or accelerate where necessary.

Incremental approach

During these steps, the portfolio management processes were set up, the new roles were appointed, the relevant events were initiated and the playbook, documentation and templates were delivered. With this approach, we opted for a growth model, in which we delivered a 'new version' of the portfolio management process each time.

Change approach

Prowareness Xeleron supported the multidisciplinary LPM working group and the Portfolio team for 9 months with expertise in theory and best practices from the market. After intensive guidance in the first period of the change process, the focus was on securing the change and building the capabilities in the organization to be able to continuously improve itself. There are also additional ambitions to, for example, steer the portfolio more value-driven and data-driven.

Result

All in all, Centric PSS now has a more central control. There is more synergy between the different business units and they are now better able to control the total portfolio of projects. The established portfolio team makes clear choices and works even more from business value for the organization and customers.

Want to know more?

In this change process we used, among other things, our insights and experience in the field of SAFe, agile transformation and agile portfolio management.

• Book Agile Portfolio Management – Henny Portman, Rini van Solingen
• Portfolio Management lunch sessions – Prowareness Xeleron
• Book Agile Transformation – Bas van Lieshout
• Scaled Agile Framework