Portfolio management at Kadaster

An interview with Niels Pleiter, Sr. Portfolio Manager at Kadaster

We had a conversation with Niels Pleiter, Sr. Portfolio Manager at Kadaster, the Dutch Land Registry. We talked about portfolio management at Kadaster and how he helps bring a project portfolio of 550,000 man-hours to more maturity.

The project portfolio within Kadaster is organized completely agile.
At the time Niels joins Kadaster, the change initiatives are mainly included in the portfolio management, not the going concern projects.
Their registration takes place at the strategic/tactical level in a spreadsheet in which the annual plan is presented.
It is a document of impressive size.

A tilt of the organization

Even before Niels’ arrival, a tilt took place within Kadaster. Whereas the organization used to be organized in silos with their own management and corresponding objectives, value streams have now been defined that determine the steering of the organization across departments and managements. As part of that change, it has also been determined that steering will not only look at the renewal projects, but at the entire project portfolio, including adaptive issues and going concern. The portfolio to be assessed is thus three times larger. The existing approach for steering from a spreadsheet has thus become unworkable. There is a need for professionalization, including in the area of software for portfolio management. Kadaster chose Fortes Change Cloud (FCC) just before Niels arrived to start a Proof of Concept (PoC) with.

Niels is tasked with guiding this PoC process and assessing whether FCC meets the needs of Kadaster. For this purpose, test criteria to be validated have been determined. In order to test FCC on a small scale, this PoC will be carried out within the value stream Rights and Security and the supporting service Business Services. Together with the product managers of that value stream and support service, the strategic results, epics and features to be achieved are set up. Three months after the start of the setup, the findings are fed back to the management. The outcome is positive. “Of course there are always areas for improvement, but the tool met what we wanted to achieve,” Niels said. The setup of the PoC environment will be adopted with some improvements for the final environment and FCC will be extended with the full project administration.

Land Registry

Towards an integral portfolio

Currently the projects for all value streams are defined at epic level in FCC. But Niels’ personal ambition is higher: “I see room for improvement. People like to use the old Excels, because they fulfill their specific wishes and needs. It’s not easy to let go of that. People look for recognition of those familiar documents in FCC. It’s up to us to entice everyone to really embrace and keep up with FCC so that we have an integrated portfolio with all the information. We want to have a centralized database in place and one way of working with unified use of terms.” That process is still ongoing. Virtually everyone with an interface with the change portfolio gets access to FCC. This allows everyone to find the information they need. The user community that is intended to use FCC really intensively and on a daily basis consists of about 17 product managers and between 50 to 65 product owners. In addition, there are a number of project managers. JIRA is used for operational control. Two scenarios were developed before work began on the final design of FCC.

  1. The portfolio of projects will be put into FCC with the processes and working methods as they are currently used within the Land Registry (IST).
    Then it will be improved for each domain.
  2. The ideal situation for processes is designed (SOLL) and implemented in FCC.
    Everyone is trained extensively on the new situation, after which the organization starts working with the new optimized approach.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both scenarios.
In scenario 1, you benefit from your new tooling immediately.
In scenario 2, you move more slowly but include everyone in your change process.
Because of the urgency of a more integrated view of the portfolio, scenario 1 was chosen.

Assisting in the transition

The Kadaster works in Guilds. Several sessions are held per guild to land the use of FCC. In these, the principles and principles are explained and the intentions with the switch. User training sessions are also planned to make people functionally at home in FCC.

Planning has been done to guide the various value stream domains through the transition.
Due to circumstances, unrelated to the project, that planning has been somewhat delayed.
As a result, some are still administering project information outside of FCC.
This year’s mission is to secure integral working with FCC organization-wide.

Best practices

We asked Niels what recommendations he would make to other portfolio managers facing a similar challenge as he did in 2022.
He explained that one of the biggest learnings has been that a dedicated pulling force is really very important within such a project.
Someone who keeps an eye on the future and can hold people accountable.
When people have to do it ‘on the side’, change quickly loses out to the delusion of the day.

Another lesson Niels shares is that accountability must be secured within every layer of your organization. Immediate managers need to hold their people accountable for using FCC for integral portfolio insight and provide coaching where needed.
“This year everything has to be in FCC. Initiatives that are not in there are simply not going to be done in 2025.”
Niels stresses that you must guard against shadow administrations, where people use their old systems and periodically “update” the integral administration.

On a quarterly basis, Niels reviews the status of each value stream so that he can engage with the various Guilds to help them go through the behavioral change required.
This mainly involves creating awareness about why and penetrating the value-added. ” You want to bring people into it, that it’s not about administration.
Administration is looking back and often feels like a waste of time.
Instead, this is about looking forward: What are we going to do?
When are we successful, what components make up our goal, what dependencies are there between those components and how can we manage them?

Finally, the link between the program backlog in JIRA and strategic tactical steering in FCC is crucial to also demonstrate the added value of portfolio thinking. That provides enormously valuable insights. “We got to that relatively late, and in retrospect I would have liked to have implemented that much earlier.”

Ambitions

The biggest task for the foreseeable future is to ensure that everyone works in unison.
But there are still plenty of ambitions for after that.
Some ambitions only require time and effort, others expansion or adaptation of functionality in FCC.
The ambitions have been named on four functional spearheads:

  1. Year planning from the integral portfolio, from FCC
  2. Short-, medium- and long-term capacity planning
  3. Linking JIRA
  4. Graphic roadmap in FCC

To realize the ambitions on those four axes, Kadaster uses support from an external consultant Erik Engbers of BvPS who, according to Niels, has really “worked miracles.
In addition, the lines of communication with Fortes are short and there is room for direct consultation on developments in FCC.
Bringing the organization along with the ambitions from here on is done mainly in a smaller setting, where especially the management of the business units are included in the usefulness and necessity and they are responsible for further implementation within the agreed frameworks.

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