Rather than funding specific innovation or change initiatives, portfolios should fund delivery capacity, with the detail of what these deliver being agreed as part of the Quarterly Planning Process.
This means that each Portfolio will need to understand how to allocate and organise its delivery capacity to most effectively deliver its objectives and roadmap. This could mean alignment of delivery organisations to change initiatives (resulting in something that looks like a traditional project), but similarly could involve a single delivery organisation taking responsibility for innovation, change and run of a given set of products where there is a significant technology overlap, or a delivery organisation responsible for keeping the lights on for legacy systems as efficiently as possible.
This allocation and organisation of delivery capacity should be reviewed as part of the Quarterly Portfolio Review, allowing them to evolve as the demand for new capabilities emerges and old existing capabilities reduces. However, given the introduction, closure, ramping up, or ramping down of capacity is likely to require a lead time, portfolios should be maintaining a view of the expected delivery capacity on their Portfolio Roadmap, allowing time to prepare for changes.
For clarity, when we talk about delivery capacity, we’re talking about teams (or teams of teams). These can either be internal delivery teams (potentially embedding external people), or external suppliers providing entire delivery teams (or teams of teams) as a service. When contracting with external suppliers for delivery capacity, agile contracting methods should be used. A key element of this being joint ownership of delivery – the portfolio should retain decisions on prioritisation and objectives (the what), with suppliers being responsible for the how, and with decisions being made collectively. This will require the portfolio to become an intelligent customer, taking responsibility for setting the direction and strategy.
For portfolios that primarily manage a portfolio of sub-portfolios, there is unlikely to be a need for long-lived delivery capability, however, there may be times where there are innovation or change activities that span multiple sub-portfolios. These can be established through dedicated innovation or outcome teams at the portfolio level.