Who is Responsible for Managing Portfolio in Kanban?

Kanban is a project management methodology that helps visualize your workflow, control the process, and maximize results. There are many ways to use Kanban effectively. This blog explores the concept of Portfolio Kanban – what it is, how it works, and who is responsible for managing it.

What is Portfolio Kanban?

Portfolio Kanban is a system for managing and improving workflow when you have a portfolio of projects. It takes the basic concept of Kanban methodology and applies it to multiple projects at once. Just as with individual projects, it’s a visual tool for tracking the status of interconnected projects simultaneously. 

Using Portfolio Kanban helps improve the visibility of projects. You can see what projects you have in progress, what resources you need to complete them, and how they are related. Used well, this will help reduce cycle time and increase throughput. 

Individuals, teams, or organizations can use the system to manage any combination of work for any kind of project. This ranges from software development to sales, to marketing campaigns, to HR projects, to construction. Any project that includes a long list of interconnected tasks can benefit from visualizing those tasks using Portfolio Kanban.

How is Portfolio Kanban different from a regular Kanban board?

Managers and project management professionals who are new to Kanban can often get confused about how to use Portfolio Kanban. That’s because it is a little more complicated than using basic Kanban boards. 

In particular, the Portfolio Kanban method applies across all hierarchy levels. You can use it to track projects at the team level, product management level, project management level, or higher. This is what makes it hard to know who should manage the process. 

If a regular Kanban board operates at the team level, then the Kanban cards on your Portfolio Kanban board are “parents” of one or more cards on your team Kanban board. Completing a card or task at the team level should then automatically update the Portfolio board.

Team-level Kanban boards represent workflow visually as a series of tasks arranged into three basic columns: 

1. Backlog. All new ideas and work items that are waiting to be worked on. 
2. Work In Progress. All tasks currently being worked on. 
3. Done. All completed tasks. 

This looks quite simple:

When a card on the team board is moved to “In Progress”, the parent card on the Portfolio Kanban board should also be considered “In Progress” because the team task has been started. Similarly, when all the related team-level cards are moved to “Done”, the parent tasks on the Portfolio Kanban board should also move to “Done”.

A Portfolio Kanban board, by contrast, aligns strategy and execution by identifying, communicating, and governing the largest and most strategic initiatives. These are also known as epics. Portfolio Kanban describes the process of ‘statuses’ that an epic goes through on its way from creation to execution. This is what a Kanban OKR board looks like:

Who should be responsible for managing Portfolio Kanban?

Portfolio Kanban can visualize and track projects from team level all the way up through project managers to program managers to C-suite business leaders. This is one reason it can be confusing when it comes to who should manage it. 

However, the answer is relatively simple and dictated by the process itself. Those responsible for managing Portfolio Kanban epics are known as epic owners. 

These epic owners collaborate with other stakeholders to define the epic, its minimum viable product (MVP), and the Lean business case. Once the business case is approved, the epic owner also oversees and facilitates implementation. Epic owners collaborate directly with other stakeholders to define the features and capabilities that will realize the value of approved epics. 

Who is assigned as epic owner in an organization varies depending on an organization’s policies and processes. This can be a trial-and-error process that you will need to perfect over the course of several projects. The important thing to remember is that the epic owner should be someone who can carry out the following responsibilities:

• Prioritizing work according to urgency or impact and delegating tasks accordingly.
• Managing the team’s timeline, communicating priorities, and ensuring that there’s enough capacity to meet deadlines.
• Checking if Kanban cards have been completed correctly.
• Identifying potential risks or issues with implementing requirements and features, and determining if the available resources are sufficient.  
• Developing work plans and timelines for teams that include dependencies where necessary.

Ready to start using Portfolio Kanban in your organization?

Now you have a good idea of what Portfolio Kanban is, how it works, and who is responsible for managing it. Isn’t it time to look at how it could help you to manage your organization’s projects more effectively? 

Find out more about how Teamhood’s flexible Kanban system works, or book a demo to see how it could work for you: