Portfolio Canvas : What Sections are Included in this SAFe Portfolio Canvas

Portfolio Canvas

A portfolio canvas is a visual management tool for defining and managing your products and services at the portfolio level. It describes what you will create, how you plan to provide it, who your customers are and how much investment is involved in realizing the vision.

The canvas breaks this information down into manageable chunks by showing different streams of work that represent features, solutions, and overall benefits. A range of templates describes the divisions and workflow relationships among these elements, making it easy to watch their development and progress throughout the project lifecycle.

SAFe Portfolio Canvas

The Scaled Agile Framework is a holistic organizational design system built by experts. It is put together to bridge the gap between your business goals and your agile development processes, thus creating an effective workflow. It includes roles, responsibilities, plans for work, values you should uphold, and more.

SAFe portfolio canvas promotes transparency and efficiency across large numbers of agile teams. It is formed around three core ideas: 

Lean Portfolio Management - It incorporates lean and systems thinking methodologies at the strategy and execution stages.

Organizational Agility - Agile teams with 'lean thinking' can optimize business processes and build a strategy with a clear vision, leading them to adapt to new opportunities.

Continuous Learning Culture - A continuous learning culture is a company's way of life wherein each individual embraces personal growth and is eager to refine their skills and expertise to fully commit to and deliver on the company's present and future set of goals and objectives.

The Scaled Agile portfolio canvas is modeled after the Business Model Canvas. The portfolio canvas details a development value stream in a way that allows for better visualization of what your company produces in the form of a service or product. It outlines the development value streams that comprise a SAFe portfolio, the value propositions and solutions they produce, the clients they target, the funds allotted to each value stream, and other essential actions and events necessary to fulfill the portfolio vision. 

SAFe Agile Certification Training

The SAFe Agile certification training will set you on your path to becoming a Lean-Agile leader. You can use Lean-Agile to help you enable agile product development and thus try to meet customers' demands as quickly as possible alongside streamlining business processes so as not to introduce too many unnecessary complexities at once. 

SAFe certification training is acknowledged worldwide and is the most popularly accepted approach for comprehensive Agile projects. It provides a strong, stable, and uniform method of evaluating SAFe® skills, expertise, and mindset.

Nearly three-quarters of executives agree that they want their employees to be up-to-date and capable of adapting and reskilling quickly. Safe agilist training and professional SAFe certification courses help you develop your skills, empower your team, and bring agility to your workday. 

Section of Portfolio Canvas

Value Propositions

Every value proposition covers a range of product functions and customer segments that provide valuable services or products to its targeted market. 

• Development Value Streams: The development value stream is used to build the systems and capabilities that enable the business to process, create, and deliver products and services.
• Solutions: Each value stream provides the products, services, or systems that adhere to one or more solutions, whether internal or external.
• Customers: For each value stream, customers indicate the internal or external customers. It specifies how the organization regards and serves distinct groups of consumers based on their shared characteristics.
• Channels: A channel is a tool that helps your business reach more customers. Channels help you deliver your products and services to customers by adding value and increasing product visibility and customer awareness. If you are serving external customers, it includes marketing and sales mechanisms like advertising or undertaking events to generate attention for your brand or products. If you are serving internal customers, it might include websites or custom IT applications meant to aid internal collaboration between departments to achieve certain goals about the company's growth.
• Relationship with Customer: Maintaining a positive relationship with your customers is essential for any brand or business. The nature of this relationship between a business and its customers should be managed carefully, as it can affect how effective a product will be. These relationships have an impact on the solution design and resource allocation within the portfolio.
• Lean Budget: A Lean Budget is given to each value stream, including operational, administrative, and capital costs.
• Key Performance Indicators: The metrics used to analyze the performance of the value stream investment are known as key performance indicators. 

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Resources and Activities

The key activities, partners, and resources required to accomplish the value propositions are described in this section.

• Key Partners: The buyer-supplier interactions and strategic partnerships that enable the value proposition.
• Key Activities: The most critical steps that the business does to supply its products and services.
• Key Resources: The key structural, technical, financial, human, and other qualities and assets that the business must possess to attain its goals.

Cost and Revenue Structure

The cost and revenue structure depicts how the portfolio's expenses are organized and characterize how income or revenue is accomplished.

Cost Structure: The Cost Structure Highlights the key expenditures in the portfolio's business model, including structural costs like licenses, innovation labs, and external service charges. Other expenditures (such as hardware and firmware) must be addressed when constructing cyber-physical systems.

Revenue Structure:

• List the sources and types of revenue from clients if the development value streams monetize directly.
• Take note of the primary income streams and how the client is billed (fixed price, usage-based, etc.).
• Describe the value of the solutions for internal customers, non-profits, and government organizations.

Conclusion

The work on a portfolio canvas rarely ends. Expanding one's portfolio canvas allows one to learn more about the portfolio during this process. It is important to periodically review the canvas and compare it with what is going on in the market and new technologies available throughout a product's lifecycle. 

By doing so, it becomes easier to account for changes or new information from any resource or project's perspectives through an experience-based process, rather than viewing it from a more linear approach, of course.

Becoming SAFe Certified is a straightforward first step: attend SAFe agile training, learn all there is on offer, and eventually, you can showcase your ability and position yourself as a leader and expert in the field!