Soft Ed Talks About Having An Adaptive Portfolio

SoftEd’s Shane Hastie recently blogged on the SoftEd website that the world is in a state of VUCA.

•Volatility – the rate of change is faster than has ever been experienced before, and is getting faster

•Uncertainty – we have no clarity about future outcomes and even when we believe we know what we want to achieve the rate of change means the goalposts move before we’ve had a chance to do more than take a few steps in their direction

•Complexity – there are myriads of factors which interact to influence the outcomes we could achieve.  These interactions are often unclear until after they have happened

•Ambiguity – there is haziness in almost every view of the future, we easily misinterpret events, their consequences and their causes”

As Hastie went on to expand, this presents a challenge for organisational planning and drives towards a different approach, saying, “The multi-year portfolio of a stream of projects which are completed sequentially leaves us without the ability to change direction and adapt to the VUCA realities which surround us”. As Hastie explained, agile software development was initially a reaction to the failures of predictive approaches to software engineering, resulting in better outcomes at the individual product level, and agile software development has become the most prevalent approach to building software today. 

The team at SoftEd are interested in the way that agile software development works at the individual team and product level, and for complex products where multiple teams must collaborate in a programme of work there are a variety of ‘scaling’ approaches which can be applied. To truly get the benefits of agile development, the organisation needs to rethink how they work at the portfolio level and an adaptive portfolio is a key characteristic of a truly learning organisation, one that listens and responds to the ever changing voice of their customer.

As Hastie concludes, "In the long run, the only sustainable source of competitive advantage is your organisation’s ability to learn faster than your competition."

For further information on SoftEd, their agile courses, their products and services, please visit the website at http://www.softed.com.