Making the right investments at the right time, then getting value for your spend.
Many organisations will be working through their change portfolio planning at this time of year, engaging the Executive team to agree what investments should best be made in the next year or two.
Most people who are involved in this process will probably be rolling their eyes at the thought of it, but at CBS our experience is that with a few simple guiderails, 80%-90% of the investment choices looked after themselves and the debate is around the edges.
That might not stop the debate being lively (and sometimes protracted!), but how can you come out of your annual portfolio planning process confident that you are investing your limited resources in the most valuable change, the portfolio of work that will best support you in achieving your Strategy?
Key Steps to Ensure Strategic Alignment.
The first step is to be able to clearly articulate your strategy and to be able to measure objectively where you are against the outcomes you need to achieve to deliver it, through an agreed set of easy-to-understand metrics.
Being clear on where you need to move the dials lets you understand the capabilities you need to improve and their respective importance to your strategy – the objective metrics help to avoid the “who shouts loudest” approach to portfolio planning, and considering capabilities rather than short term fixes helps to avoid technical debt.
The second step is to apply a healthy set of pragmatism. For most organisations, this isn’t just a case of aligning investment to strategy, there’s a need to consider and deliver change driven by regulation, risk appetite, legacy issues and often a need to support small change too. Scrutinising these items as carefully as strategic change helps to ensure value is maximised.
Having gotten to an agreed view of the investments you want to make, two other key learns from past experience are:
- Establish a “backlog” of items that you do expect to do in future change cycles. Better to say “yes, but not right now” rather than “no” if you are genuinely committed to an initiative but can’t start it straight away.
- If it is “no”, then say “no”! Stop pet projects, stop side of desk work and stop people being distracted from agreed priorities. Share explicitly what is NOT being done, and why other things are determined to be more important.
Doing both of these things helps to keep colleagues engaged and reduces misunderstanding about what matter most, bringing sharper focus to priorities.
Reduce Delivery Risk through Portfolio Management.
From here on, having agreed and communicated your portfolio you can really reduce delivery risk by agreeing the sequence of initiatives, the governance and change methodology you’ll use, key solution designs and crucially, the appropriate allocation and scheduling of resource whether it’s people, technology or third party services.
We’ve seen these steps make a real difference to organisations, setting them up for successful delivery of change, implementations and on to benefit delivery, moving the dials as intended and achieving the outcomes that matter.
If you think this approach could help your business, please get in touch and we’ll be happy to chat further.