Strategic Themes Workshop — Usability
When to Implement
Each of the following Scenarios can be used to determine if now is the right time for you to conduct a Strategic Themes Workshop.
Strategic Change or Business Transformation: The organization is undergoing a major shift in direction, and there’s a need to ensure Agile execution stays aligned. A Strategic Themes workshop helps translate that new vision into actionable focus areas across teams.
Lack of Alignment: Teams or Agile Release Trains (ARTs) are working in silos or chasing different priorities. A Strategic Themes session can bring everyone back to the table to reestablish shared goals and coordinated execution.
Portfolio Prioritization: There are too many initiatives and not enough resources. Strategic Themes provide a clear lens for evaluating what matters most—so the highest-value work gets done first.
Scaling Agile Across the Enterprise: Agile is expanding, and there’s a growing gap between enterprise strategy and team-level execution. Strategic Themes help bridge that divide, ensuring Lean Portfolio Management stays connected to the big picture.
Prerequisites
Clear Enterprise Strategy – a well-defined and communicated enterprise strategy that outlines long-term goals, market positioning, and competitive priorities.
Portfolio Context – a current understanding of the portfolio’s structure, including value streams, Agile Release Trains (ARTs), and existing epics or initiatives.
Market and Customer Insights – data and analysis on customer needs, market trends, competitive landscape, and emerging opportunities or threats.
Business Objectives and Metrics – clear business goals and measurable outcomes (e.g. OKRs or KPIs) that Strategic Themes should support or influence.
Roles & Responsibilities
Facilitator: takes an unbiased approach to the workshop, ensuring collaboration, clarifying scores and applying criteria consistently to each item in the list. Typically a Release Train Engineer, a Portfolio Manager, a Scrum Master, or someone equipped in leadership facilitates the WSJF Workshop.
Pro-Tip: Having a Leader or Individual Contributor, who is really close to the work, facilitate the WSJF can result in conflict and a biased outcome. Look for someone outside of the work to facilitate, especially for the first time.
Product Manager/Product Owner: provides clear business context and value insights for each item. This context can help stakeholders accurately assess business value, urgency, and safer/better components for delay cost.
Pro-Tip: Product Owners should focus on what is being built and why, not necessarily on how. While their input on business value is absolutely critical, be sure to get IT and Architecture’s input on the level of effort.
Key Stakeholders: bring domain knowledge, strategic priorities, and unique/critical perspectives to help determine the components of Delay Cost and Effort. These stakeholders, when included in the process, will not only feel included in the work, but may become champions and emissaries of the process for many years to come.
Pro-Tip: Determining the right Key Stakeholders is critical. Look for influencers, Leadership Partners, and those that will be most familiar with the items in the list to prioritize.
Subject Matter Experts: provide clarifying details on specific items in the list, ensuring the item is well-understood by everyone involved. They often provide business impact, dependencies, and technical feasibility.
Enterprise Architect: provides technical oversight into architectural dependencies, future enablement, and long-term scalability, helping ensure that prioritization decisions align with the organization’s technical strategy.
Portfolio Manager / Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) Representative: connects Strategic Themes to portfolio-level planning and execution, ensuring that prioritization and funding decisions reflect enterprise strategy and deliver maximum business value.
NOTE: Recommended Headcount: 8-15 people. Including additional people typically slows down the process without significantly improving the relative scoring and outcomes of the WSJF Workshop.
Scheduling and Timeline
WSJF should be used when no prioritization of the Backlog exists, and/or when there are concerns about the right business value being delivered first.
Key times to consider a WSJF Workshop for large programs and portfolios:
- After a list of projects or large scope items have been identified and 4+ weeks prior to the first PI Planning.
- On a regular, but infrequent basis – Quarterly, Semi-annually or Annually. Prior WSJF scores often need to be re-evaluated as markets and business strategy change. So conduct a WSJF workshop as often as needed while adding new projects and updating scores based on new information.
Ideally, a WSJF workshop precedes the work being done by 2-4 weeks. Items that are at the top of the list typically need to be reviewed further from both a technical and a product standpoint before teams should begin breaking down and completing the work.
Consulting Effort
If you are a consultant, understanding the amount of effort to conduct a Strategic Themes session might inform how much time you reserve, and how much you charge for it. For those of you that do Value-Based contracts, the value the company receives from a Strategic Themes session will vary considerably.
For organizations, working on the wrong item first can be quite expensive, and struggling to make a decision on where to start can be even more costly.
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