Design Principles for Portfolio Agility - A Delphi Study

The complexities inherent in modern business environments require enterprises to develop agile capabilities to manage their IT investments. While agile delivery practices at the team level have become ubiquitous, enterprises struggle to scale agility to the strategic level. This paper presents a set of design principles to foster agility at the portfolio level. We conducted a qualitative Delphi study to elicit insights from expert practitioners and derive nine design principles for portfolio agility through a consensus approach. These design principles describe how agile portfolios address the flow of value, information, and capital (resources) within their organizational context. Our results form the basis for creating a comprehensive design theory around portfolio agility and represent guidance rooted in practice to develop a portfolio capability that senses, assesses, responds to, and learns from environmental changes. In addition to identifying principles fostering portfolio-level agility, this study makes a unique contribution through its view of portfolio capability as an enabler of organizational flow.