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|04 Jul 2017|Klaus Leopold

Between The Lines – Swim Lanes on the Portfolio Board

Flight Levels
2

Recently, as I was leading the design of a C-level strategic portfolio board (Flight Level 3), an interesting question arose: How do you organize a board with swim lanes so that it makes sense? This is not a trivial question since a swim lane, or line, is a very dominant element. Quite often, discussions occur around what accumulates within these lines.
There was disagreement within the group about possible line contents. Three suggestions were put forward:

  1. You could represent the areas of the company (Finance, Legal, IT, Controlling, …) in the lines. This could make sense at the portfolio level: You can see which initiatives are happening where.
  2. We could code the priority of the initiatives in the lines. There are “must-have” initiatives that are extremely important, initiatives that are somewhat important, initiatives that would be nice to have, etc.
  3. What if the lines represented the role of the initiative in the market? Does the initiative help the company differentiate itself in the market? Are we simply following the competition or is it, generally speaking, just an investment in things that need to be done?

 
Regardless which one is chosen, you can always include the other variations in the representation. If you decide, for instance, to use the areas of the company for the depiction, you can denote the priority of the initiative with different colored notes, and simply write down the role in the market on the note. This isn’t the problem.
The point is, whatever is depicted in the line will be discussed. In the first suggestion, the discussion revolves primarily around the internal organization – it’s dealing with budgets, and the question of who benefits from what. The second suggestion initiates the discussion in a vacuum, so to speak, because how do you define the importance of an initiative? In this case, you walk into the trap of political games again and those involved begin to argue, in each case, why their initiative is the most important.
It should come as no surprise that I am a fan of the third suggestion. When those who are responsible think about the role of an initiative in the market, the focus of the company turns outward. At the portfolio level, this discussion is far more interesting, and more important, than just the question of “Who’s paying?”.  All of a sudden, you start dealing with what really makes sense and, for example, if a differentiating characteristic really is a differentiating characteristic, as it is currently understood. In this discussion, you can further hone the company’s positioning.
The way I see it in this situation? It’s a good idea to show the strategy on the board! Putting your role on the market on the swim lane might be a good first step towards this direction.

Navin Anand
06 Jul 2017 15:07

Outward focus at the highest flight level drives discussion and hence the culture, so can’t agree more.
The merits of this market approach to defining swim lanes, could be blended with other constructs of digital kanban – like priority flags, tags, votes, cost of delay, class of service, etc. Capturing more, filtering and representing easy visual input for discussions.
Ensuring strategy representation, with suitable swim lanes each of which could be a portfolio lane in itself, with underlying projects and services living on linked operational boards, but separately.
What do you think?

Klaus Leopold
16 Jul 2017 11:19

Sure this makes totally sense. That’s what I tried to say: You can represent any information on a board with colors, flags, tags, etc. When you’re using an electronic tool it’s even easier because you can filter it. The point I wanted to make is that in real life I see that a swimlane is a very dominant visualization element and you should make a good choice what information to code into swimlanes. On a portfolio system I am a fan of putting the strategy in the swimlane because it provokes constant challenging of it.

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