FL3D: Strategic Portfolio Management with Flight Levels -April 7-10, 2025

4 days * 4 hours per day from 1pm-5pm ET // Learn how to codify your strategy, link it with execution, and electrify your organization!
About this Event

Class Schedule

Training Class Day 1: Monday, 07 April 2025 (1:00 PM-5:00 PM EST)
Training Class Day 2: Tuesday, 08 April 2025 (1:00 PM-5:00 PM EST)
Training Class Day 3: Wednesday, 09 April 2025 (1:00 PM-5:00 PM EST)
Training Class Day 4: Thursday, 10 April 2025 (1:00 PM-5:00 PM EST)

TIME: 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM (main session) and 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM (intersession for participants) Eastern Standard Time
4 days * 4 hours per day from 1pm-5pm EDT
Class Description

Build the missing links between Strategy and Operational Agility!

Lacking visibility into your strategic portfolio?
Finding out about problems and opportunities too late?
Struggling with People “resisting” your change programs?

This workshop will help you turn your strategy into action. Learn how to define effective outcomes and translate outcomes into action in a world of dependencies and specialists.
Why Flight Levels?
Flight Levels is an exciting new Agile thinking model that is elegantly simple yet comprehensive enough to address the entire enterprise. Using the flight levels framework, organizations can reduce their time to market, identify and capitalize on new business opportunities, understand their capacity to take on new work, measure the possible impact of new initiatives, and identify where adding new resources will give them the highest leverage.

What is Strategic Portfolio Management, and how does it help attract and retain top talent?
Today’s skilled workforce seeks an environment where they can make a difference, where their work is collaborative and purpose-driven.
The problem?
High-level strategic initiatives announced with much fanfare every three to five years may bear little resemblance with the actual work that needs to get done, day in and day out. This class demonstrates how to solve this problem— using a surprisingly simple set of techniques and many great examples.
We will teach you how to capture strategy using powerful visualizations and to link the result to the value stream level and, finally, to the team level. Rather than tracking departments and reporting lines—these visualizations comprise an Enterprise Kanban system that tracks the flow of all across the organization—encompassing IT, finance, marketing, sales, and operations.
Sounds Complicated! How is it possible?
Organizations have struggled to solve this problem for decades, and management consulting firms charge enormous fees in pursuit of this goal. However, two recent breakthroughs have enabled a great leap forward in taming organizational complexity: a renaissance in the tool ecosystem and the invention of the flight levels thinking model. Flight levels leverage the power and simplicity of Kanban across the enterprise. With this approach, here are some of the questions we can finally answer:
A) What would be the impact of a new initiative on our existing initiatives?
B) How does the distribution of money and resources break down tactical versus strategic?
C) Is our key initiative on track to achieve its goals, and how do we lean into a more dynamic big-picture mindset?
D) What is the most critical bottleneck that is preventing our timely delivery of outcomes?
This course will equip you with the knowledge to answer these questions cost-effectively.
How Does It Work?
This class teaches how to set up a Portfolio Kanban system at the strategic level, which we call flight level three. First, we visualize each element of our strategy and identify a number of tangible long-term goals. We then break down those long-term goals into a series of annual and quarterly objectives. We then link those to high-level actions and initiatives, which tie into value streams at flight level two. Adding team interactions, metrics, and feedback loops transforms all of this into a dynamic control panel for the enterprise. This class is one of a series of classes that enable lean transformation through an exciting new approach called the “flight levels thinking model.”
Do I need to know Kanban before taking this class?
Lean Portfolio management is based on the principles of Lean and Kanban, but prior experience is not necessary. FL3D will teach you everything you need to know in order to apply these principles to manage your strategic portfolio. FL3D is part of a set of three classes: FL2D, FL3D, and FLSA, that together comprise an approach to Enterprise Kanban called “flight levels.”
How does this relate to the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)?
FL3D is a lightweight and powerful approach that is fully compatible with Essential SAFe. It is highly recommended for organizations seeking a lighter weight and economical alternative or those taking the first step towards full-scale SAFe adoption. The trainer is a certified SAFe Program Consultant (SPC), Accredited Kanban Consultant (AKC), and Flight Levels Coach (FLC).
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How does this unique agile training accomplish this?

By helping us visualize the way work flows throughout the enterprise using three lenses. The flight level model is an agile training that recognizes that we need three “viewpoints” for managing our work:

Flight level three, or the strategy level,
Flight level two, or the coordination level, and
Flight level one or the team level

Flight Levels elevate your business agility skillset:

Understand and manage your flow between teams
Measure the outcomes, not just outputs, and gauge progress towards Strategic Goals.
Agile Teams can see how operational work connects to strategy.
Leaders see how Strategy connects to Reality.
Connect your levels to each other, creating a shared focus
Keep the collective focus on delivering your Company Strategy
Take your agile coaching to the next level to help your clients achieve their goals

See your capacity in real-time. With appropriate detail on each level.
Who will benefit from this type of agile leadership training?
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This is intermediate-level training aimed at those working in the following roles:

Portfolio Managers
Middle and Senior Managers
Department Heads
Scrum Master
Change Agents
Product Managers
Operation Managers
Product Owners
Project Managers
Agile Coaches
Team Leads
Tribe Leads
HR Managers

Prerequisites
Attendees should have some experience in managing the work of people and teams. In addition, attendees should have completed the online Introduction to Flight Levels (FLIN) course. The FLIN course covers the fundamental elements of Flight Levels and is required to be taken prior to attending FL3D training. You will be given the option to purchase FLIN licenses when booking FL3D training.
Certification
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This workshop is certified by Flight Levels Academy. After completing the workshop, participants receive a “Certificate of Completion” from the Flight Levels Academy.
About the Trainer
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Craeg Strong is the CTO of Ariel Partners, a small IT consulting company based in Times Square. He teaches public classes in Kanban and Human Centered Design and coaches teams to adopt and mature Agile/Kanban practices in the NYC area. He has 25 years of experience in information technology, starting at Project Athena during his undergraduate studies at MIT. Mr. Strong has successfully instituted Agile and DevOps practices on large and complex commercial and government software projects, helping them to obtain new capabilities and realize significant cost efficiencies. Mr. Strong leverages his experience as a hands-on software architect, trainer, and agile coach to help remove the barriers that prevent organizations from adopting new technologies-- such as cloud. Mr. Strong led a successful transformation of a major FBI Criminal justice program from a traditional waterfall lifecycle and manual intensive processes to lighter weight agile processes and full DevOps automation.