BROADCOM People Centric Strategic User Guide

: June 12, 2024
: BROADCOM

People Centric Strategic

THE BUYER’S GUIDE

FOR PEOPLE-CENTRIC STRATEGIC
PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE

IDENTIFYING TECHNOLOGY PLATFORMS THAT WILL HELP YOU UNITE
THE ENTERPRISE AND TAKE CHARGE OF THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

WHAT HAS CHANGED,

WHAT HAS NOT, AND WHY
A CHANGE IS NEEDED

WHAT CHANGED
It was not that long ago that technology was viewed as a kind of utility,
important and relied upon, but not strategic.
These days, technology fuels pretty much every critical business
service for every company in every industry. Technology is inextricably
bound with the business. Without technology, business stops.

WHAT HAS NOT
Technology environments continue to get more complex, dynamic, and
business critical. It seems everything about technology has changed in
recent years—except the way it is funded.

WHAT IS THE PROBLEM
While business and technology are intertwined, the same is not true for
business and technology leaders. These leaders operate in different
spheres and speak different languages. This is perhaps best underscored
by their respective goals and metrics. Business leaders are focused on
ROI, revenue, and profit margin. IT teams are focused on metrics like flow
rate, delivery state and portfolio change.
In many ways, technology planning and funding are run the same way
they have been for decades. These legacy, project-based approaches are
inefficient and wasteful, and are fundamentally misaligned with modern
technologies and realities.

This stubborn disconnect stifles business outcomes and digital
transformation success. According to Gartner research, “By 2025, 70% of
digital investments will fail to deliver the expected business outcomes
due to the absence of a strategic portfolio management approach.” 1

Gartner, “Top Trends for Strategic Portfolio Leaders for 2023,” Kevin Rose, Rachel Longhurst, et al, August 14, 2023, ID: G00789708

01 THE REQUIREMENT: PEOPLE-CENTRIC PLANNING

TO MEET YOUR PRESSING IMPERATIVES, YOU AND YOUR TEAMS CAN NOT CONTINUE TO OPERATE THE SAME WAY, FUNDING WORK
AND PROJECTS. NOW, TECHNOLOGY FUNDING AND PLANNING NEEDS TO GO THROUGH A FUNDAMENTAL SHIFT.
Now, it is about funding the products and the teams that are delivering value. Now is the time to move to people-centric funding.

Here are three
hallmarks of this
approach:

Teams are given persistent,
long-term funding.
Teams are organized around
products and value streams,
rather than in the siloed
departments of the past.
Teams work toward common,
business-level objectives.

READ ON TO FIND OUT MORE
ABOUT PEOPLE-CENTRIC
PLANNING AND HOW YOU CAN
FIND THE OPTIMAL SOLUTION
FOR YOUR ORGANIZATION.

02 THREE PILLARS OF PEOPLE-CENTRIC PLANNING

There are three key pillars that form the foundation of a successful people- centric planning implementation.

PILLAR #1

GOVERN INNOVATION WITH INCREASED VISIBILITY
Historically, teams have been focused on the never-ending cycles of
funding projects and work. Laborious, detailed planning exercises
were undertaken and granular requirements were established—and
they were out of date immediately. Therefore, the process never really
ended.

With the interweaving of business and IT, teams need to move to
tracking a single set of metrics: business metrics, namely value.
According to a Gartner report, 60% of strategic portfolio leaders will
transition from a focus on delivery execution to a focus on value
realization.2

With people-centric planning, teams are given visibility into key
metrics and they’re given the autonomy to determine how to best
achieve those metrics. Across the organization, teams are using a
single set of metrics, and they’re tracked in real-time. This is the way
people-centric planning helps foster directional alignment. All that
ultimately matters is that business metrics are moving in the right
direction and that teams are contributing to those outcomes.

PILLAR #2

ALIGN TECHNOLOGY WITH BUSINESS
Through people-centric planning, you create value streams that fuse
business and IT staff. All these teams align around one set of shared
and negotiated goals.

This takes negotiation between your business and technology
stakeholders. Often, in an effort to strike the right balance among
various types of work, it is helpful to have these leaders negotiate
percentages.

For example, the decision could be to establish a mix in which 20% is
dedicated to defect resolution, 40% to new feature development, 20%
to addressing technical debt, and 20% to discretionary work. Leaders
may have these conversations on a calendar basis. A business leader
may ask for an increase in allocations to new feature development, but
the technology leader will have to balance that with potential
ramifications of putting off technical debt reduction.
Either way, these leaders need to have a good working relationship
and believe that each person is being reasonable and truly partnering
in negotiation.

PILLAR #3

EMPOWER TEAMS TO OPTIMIZE EFFICIENCY
People-centric funding is about boosting efficiency. A big part of how
it achieves this is through decentralizing authority. Fundamentally, you
need to have good people and have visibility into what they are doing,
while enabling them to make decisions in a timely fashion. Ultimately,
it’s about trusting that they are best equipped to know what’s the
right thing to do and when.

Instead of funding individual projects with temporary funding, you
continuously fund the teams delivering the products and services that
generate value. When teams have persistent funding, they can be
empowered with the autonomy to figure out what needs to be done
and do it. Teams gain the freedom to adapt, without having to go back
to a central authority.

There is still accountability. You make portfolio-level decisions at the
beginning of the year. Maybe you decide to reduce or eliminate
funding for a team that’s no longer delivering value based on the
metrics defined. However, as long as a team continues to deliver value,
they’ll continue to be funded. That is all the governance you need.

03 BUSINESS ADVANTAGES OF PEOPLE-CENTRIC PLANNING

ENHANCED VISIBILITY AND INSIGHTS
Through effective people-centric planning, your teams have increased
visibility into capacity planning, resource management, and risk
management. Teams can apply concrete insights to fuel continuous
improvement.

With improved visibility, teams throughout the organization get the
insights needed to make better decisions. Teams gain better visibility
into top-level strategies, and they can use this insight to better
prioritize backlogs and resources. Better visibility fosters improved
trust and collaboration, and it helps minimize business risk.

IMPROVED ALIGNMENT
By cultivating the establishment of optimized value streams, peoplecentric
planning enables teams to align strategy, planning, and work
across the organization. With this tighter alignment, teams are better
positioned to connect strategy with work, reduce unnecessary
friction, and foster deeper collaboration.

OPTIMIZED EFFICIENCY
Traditional investment planning and project funding requires users to
articulate every detail of what’s going to be delivered, justify it at length,
and then fund it. Inevitable changes require that process to be repeated
over and over again.

By contrast, people-centric planning ensures stakeholders are in
agreement on the value being generated. As such, they commit to
funding products and teams for an entire fiscal term. Instead of getting
bogged down in processes, people-centric planning empowers teams to
make changes on the fly.

Users can move things around during the roadmap review and see the
impact of different changes. Doing so improves time to market and it
boosts agility. Through people-centric planning, you can minimize the
effort and overhead associated with governance, while still ensuring you
get the value needed.

04 GETTING STARTED

#1 GET ORGANIZED
To get started with people-centric initiatives, it is
vital to first ensure you have maximum visibility and
can gain a complete understanding of your
application portfolio, investments, resources, and
people. Toward that end, it is important to
categorize, assess, and analyze your application
portfolio, and to the greatest extent possible, begin
to centralize portfolio administration.

#2 SET THE COURSE
Next, your leaders need to establish a roadmap for
transformation, and ensure that roadmap is aligned
with top-level business strategies. Roadmaps need
to be developed, refined, reviewed, and approved by
key stakeholders. Teams need to be able to track
progress of investments and initiatives, and
knowledgeably determine how they are advancing
business strategies. Further, it is vital to establish
mechanisms to ensure roadmaps are reviewed on a
recurring basis to ensure they stay aligned with
evolving business realities and priorities.

#3 OPTIMIZE DELIVERY
Teams need to optimize work flows to speed
execution. To do so, leaders need to have the unified
visibility needed to intelligently balance application
work and priorities with people capacity. Toward this
end, it is essential that organizations establish a
consistent model for managing and tracking
strategy, objectives, work efforts, progress, and
results.

#4 TRACK PROGRESS AND ACHIEVE BENEFITS
Teams must take a data-driven approach, tracking
progress toward planned objectives and key
targeted results. To do so, teams must move from
the reliance on quarterly status reports and other
techniques of the past and leverage real-time
dashboards that keep all stakeholders apprised.
Data from execution needs to be rolled up for
business leadership, delivering real-time insights that
reveal what is happening across the organization.

05 KEY REQUIREMENTS

COMPLETE INTELLIGENCE
To realize the complete potential of people-centric planning, teams need advanced, unified technology solutions that deliver all the following capabilities:

Team Collaboration
When it comes to collaboration, solutions can either help the cause—or
hurt it. Look for a unified app that gives everyone the current
information they need. Without leaving the app, teams should be able
to ask questions, provide updates, and more. Keep all team members
in sync and share your plans with other groups and executives. Tools
should enable teams to create, share, and automate to-do lists with
groups both inside and outside the organization.

Strategic Roadmaps
Your solution should give you the agility to map strategy to objectives
on drag-and-drop roadmaps, so you can clearly understand how your
products are performing. Unlike never-ending Gantt charts, roadmaps
let you nest multiple workstreams under each investment, with direct
links to resources, work, and financial data.

Staff Allocation
Leverage a solution that offers complete support for intelligent staff
allocation. You should be able to find the right person or team, and
allocate specific percentages of their workload to ideas, projects, or
custom investments—with the click of a button. Tools should make it
easy to search for and filter available resources and investments,
including at the department or team level.

Reporting and Analytics
To fully realize people-centric planning’s potential, people from various
groups and different levels need to be able to gain real-time access to
data from across the organization. Your solution should provide
executive teams with consolidated reports that enable objective
comparison of what they planned and what was executed. Gain
reporting capabilities that help users to quickly create, adjust, and
share near-real-time information with stakeholders and team members.

Continuous Investment Planning
Your solution should empower you to prioritize work based on
business outcomes, not gut feelings. The solution should help you
engage teams and executives in ongoing roadmap planning, all with a
clear goal of delivering more customer value.

Value-Based Prioritization
Leverage value-based prioritization capabilities, which is key to making
planning more powerful and realistic. View all planned initiatives and
the areas these efforts support, whether optimizing current operations,
supporting future growth, or fortifying long-term business resilience.

05 KEY REQUIREMENTS

COMPLETE FLEXIBILITY
You need a people-centric planning solution that works for your organization. Demand a solution that offers these capabilities to ensure alignment
with your specific organization, teams, and objectives:

Multi-Dimensional Hierarchies
Your solution should give you the flexibility to organize investments
the way your business runs, including arranging people, work, and
money by product lines. Go beyond traditional projects and configure
the investment hierarchies and types that you need.

Support Any Development Methodology
Leverage a platform that can help you govern all technology
investments and teams across your organization, including those
working with traditional, agile, and hybrid approaches.

Definable Investment Types
Your organization has its own specific requirements and objectives.
Look for a solution that enables you to organize investments your way,
with fiscal periods that align with your calendar. Make sure you can set
up different investment types, including projects, products, and
platforms.

Broad Technology Integration Support
For complete, intelligent management of teams and digital products,
your solution must feature strong integrations with your other business
tools. Solutions should come with preconfigured connectors for a
range of solutions, including application lifecycle management (ALM),
IT service management (ITSM), enterprise agility, DevOps, and more.

06 CHOOSING THE RIGHT TECHNOLOGY PARTNER

To succeed with people-centric planning, you need more than technology. You need the right solution provider.
Find a strategic partner that can help your organization maximize the power of a people-centric planning approach.

LOOK FOR A PARTNER THAT CHECKS THESE BOXES:

Domain Expertise
Partner with an organization that has a history of
successful VSM implementations and a track record of
thought leadership and innovation in its foundational
disciplines, such as digital product management,
portfolio management, and enterprise agile.

Advanced, Integrated Solutions
Trust a provider that offers the innovative and
integrated solutions that empower all value streams
across the enterprise—not just IT.

Demonstrated Success in the Enterprise
Work with a provider that has a track record of
working with the world’s largest, most complex
organizations—and with people and solutions that
have proven to be successful in these demanding
environments.

Robust Partner Ecosystem
Choose a solution provider that has an extensive array
of strategic partners that have complementary
services and solutions. Ensure you can work with the
organizations and teams who are best equipped to
provide proven blueprints, strategies, and expertise
that can help you expedite the realization of value
from your investments.

07 EVALUATION

HERE ARE SOME KEY QUESTIONS TO ASK A POTENTIAL PROVIDER:

Enterprise-Wide Support
• Can your solution help me establish true, enterprise-wide value streams?
• Can your solution be used across my organization, including by teams in
business, IT, development, marketing, and human resources?
• Can your solution be efficiently integrated with technologies I have in place?

Traceability of Value
• Does your solution offer unified data models for tracking value?
• Does the solution also enable teams at every level of my organization to quickly
and efficiently get the insights they need?

Boost Efficiency, Reduce Waste
• Does your solution give us the flexibility we need to adapt to the specific requirements
of our teams and enterprise-wide value streams?
• Will your solution enable us to establish uniform guardrails that ensure compliance
with policies and mandates?
• Can your solution scale to support thousands of users?

08 CUSTOMER SUCCESS

Within Boeing, groups across the organization have been able
to deliver much more, with much less—with Clarity™. The
organization’s leaders were able to get the insights they
needed to eliminate massive amounts of low-value work, which
resulted in a 30% project cost reduction worth hundreds of
millions of dollars. While the business weathered a challenging
period, Clarity enabled teams to achieve improved business
outcomes and hundreds of millions of dollars in savings.

With Clarity, the team at Honda was able to turn work into
value streams. The team leveraged the solution’s strategic
roadmap functionality, which helped them eliminate manual
work and cultivate a collective understanding of key priorities
and work status among key stakeholders. The solution fueled
improved engagement, efficiency, and empowerment across
the organization.

At Unum, Clarity delivered the improved insights that fueled
intelligent, data-driven decision making. The organization’s
successful rollout of value streams enabled them to maximize
outcomes while minimizing disruption. These gains ultimately
yielded improvements where it mattered most: customer value.

The team at Verizon relies on Clarity. With the solution, leaders
were able to reimagine the way work gets done—and see
dramatic results. The solution fueled a range of improvements
across multiple business domains. Within one portfolio alone,
the company immediately realized $2 million in cost savings.

09 CONCLUSION

Too much has changed in recent years. Your organization can not afford to
continue to rely on decades-old technology funding models. By employing
people-centric planning approaches, your organization can eliminate the waste,
inefficiency, and inflexibility of old-school approaches.

Instead, you can establish alignment around key business metrics, empower
teams, and streamline governance. Find out how you can leverage people-centric
planning to maximize visibility, alignment, and efficiency in your organization.

CONNECT WITH A PEOPLE-CENTRIC PLANNING EXPERT
Connect with a Broadcom® people-centric planning specialist to learn more about how our technology can help you eliminate waste, achieve
strategic initiatives, and align your entire enterprise around customer value.

VISIT BROADCOM.COM/CLARITY

ABOUT CLARITY FROM BROADCOM

Broadcom is a leader in the VSM software market. With our Clarity
solution, businesses can implement and manage an effective, efficient
DPM strategy that enables internal teams to gain the visibility required to
maximize alignment, reduce inefficiencies, and speed time to value.
With Clarity from Broadcom, executives can more effectively understand
priorities, capacity, progress, and results across their organizations.

As part of the Broadcom ValueOps™ platform, Clarity enables every role
within an enterprise to manage, track, and analyze digital products and
their associated value streams. With the solution, teams can focus more
squarely on delivering the strategic outcomes that matter to your
business.

To learn more about collaborative work management
capabilities from Broadcom, be sure to visit
BROADCOM.COM/CLARITY

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January 8, 2024