What is Agile project and portfolio management?

Agile project and portfolio management (PPM) combines centralised project management with real-time data to prioritise work dynamically. Organisations respond to rapidly changing market conditions and deliver customer value more quickly.

Agile isn’t just for software developers: project managers, product managers, finance folks, the legal team, and even the C-suite can benefit from Agile project management, particularly when it’s available as part of an all-in-one DevOps platform like GitLab.

Agile PPM practices help teams get better software out the door faster and improve cross-functional collaboration across the organization.

Agile PPM extends beyond software developers. Project managers, product managers, finance teams, legal departments, and executives all benefit from Agile project management practices.

The approach works best when available as part of an integrated DevOps platform that connects all stakeholders.

What are the benefits of agile project and portfolio management?

Agile PPM enables continuous value delivery by streamlining how value is created sustainably and predictably.

How does agile PPM align priorities?

Teams consistently align priorities to business objectives and strategic goals. Work that does not support organisational strategy gets deprioritised automatically.

How does agile PPM improve performance visibility?

Teams accurately understand their own performance, delivery capacity, and teammate capabilities. This visibility enables realistic planning and resource allocation.

How does agile PPM reduce risk?

Agile PPM reduces risks and costs associated with slow responses to problems like software bugs or customer complaints. Early detection prevents issues from escalating.

How does agile PPM enable quick decisions?

Teams make rapid decisions in response to evolving customer needs or market conditions. Short feedback loops replace lengthy approval processes.

How does agile PPM accelerate feedback?

Teams deliver and receive fast feedback to and from coworkers and customers. Continuous feedback maximises value delivered with each release.

Some best practices questions to understand in order to ensure successful Agile PPM implementation.

How to start with strategy?

Identify whether each project aligns with organisational business strategy. Deprioritise anything misaligned. When strategic objectives change, shift project direction accordingly.

How do you monitor project progress?

Maintain visibility into each task status and overall sprint or milestone progress over time. Burndown charts provide quick status understanding and enable stakeholder updates across the business.

How do you manage your resources?

Monitor where team members might be overloaded and where extra bandwidth or budget exists. Issue boards and kanban boards offer quick status updates and identify resource gaps.

Why is iteration important?

Deliver work in short sprints so customer feedback maximises value with each release. Avoid iterations so small they fail to deliver on actual needs. Working iteratively allows teams to experiment while learning from successes and failures.

How do Agile and DevOps work together?

Agile PPM delivers maximum value when integrated with a DevOps platform. The combination creates seamless workflows from planning through deployment.

To understand how to get the most out of Agile PPM it’s helpful to take a deep dive into how Agile works on a DevOps platform.

Breaking it down further, here are the Agile steps most teams follow, and how they work seamlessly with a DevOps platform:

• Issues: Start with an issue that captures a single feature that delivers business value for users.
• Tasks: Often, an issue can be further separated into individual parts. Use tasks within GitLab issues to break issues down into smaller steps or deliverables.
• Issue boards: Track issues and communicate progress, all in one platform. An issue board is a single interface that allows you to follow your issues from backlog to done.
• Epics: Manage your portfolio of projects more efficiently and with less effort by tracking groups of issues that share a theme, across projects and milestones.
• Milestones: Track issues and merge requests created to achieve a broader business goal or strategic objective in a certain period of time.
• Roadmaps: Start date and/or due date can be visualized in the form of a timeline. The epics roadmap page shows such a visualization for all the epics which are under a group and/or its subgroups.
• Labels: Create and assign labels to individual issues, which then allows you to filter the issue lists by a single label or multiple labels.
• Burndown chart: Track work in real time and mitigate risks as they arise. Burndown charts allow teams to visualize the issues scoped to a current sprint as they are being completed.
• Issue weights: Indicate the estimated effort required to complete an issue by assigning it a weight.
• Collaboration: The ability to contribute conversationally is offered throughout GitLab in issues, epics, merge requests, commits, and more!
• Traceability: Align your team’s issues with subsequent merge requests that give you complete traceability from issue creation to completion once the related pipeline passes.
• Wikis: Keep your documentation in the same project where your code resides.
• Enterprise Agile frameworks: Large enterprises have adopted Agile at enterprise scale using a variety of frameworks. GitLab can support SAFe, Spotify, Disciplined Agile Delivery, and more.

It’s easy to forget that every part of an organization needs help with planning and project management, not just those involved with software development.

We’re always happy to “dogfood” our own tool: here’s how we use GitLab for marketing project management and how one team manages partner alliances. In our experience, Agile planning works best with a DevOps platform.

Since Agile project and portfolio management has a lot of moving parts, we created a quick hands-on demo and a more in-depth option.

If you’re trying to project manage multiple Agile teams, watch a walkthrough of how to do that. And if you’re confused about how GitLab’s issues work, watch this GitLab issue boards demo. Wonder how it all can work using the Scaled Agile Framework? Here’s everything you need to know.

The British Geological Society needed a way its scientific staff could stay involved with the software development team.

The solution was GitLab’s DevOps platform and its project management capabilities. Check out the case study to learn how BGS has accelerated software development with a collaborative process where code is visible to everyone and security testing is built in.