Topics › Defining and delivering strategy
Prioritizing the portfolio
The planning round is coming, and the list of initiatives is longer than the budget can support. Every division can explain why its own initiative cannot wait, and every decision to stop or defer a project will be read as a decision against its sponsor.
What is at stake
When everything is a priority, resources are spread so thin that no project gets what it needs to succeed. The most important initiatives slow down together with the least important ones, and money is spent without anything being finished. Divisions that lose out without understanding why stop backing the next plan, while the real decisions move into informal channels.
What typically goes wrong
- Each project is assessed on its own merits, never against the others.
- The budget is cut evenly across all divisions to avoid conflict, but leaves most with too little to execute on their priorities.
- The decision is prepared by a staff function that has no authority to say no to a division head.
- Criteria are agreed in the abstract and dropped at the first project with a powerful sponsor.
- Projects that lose out are not stopped but continue on smaller budgets, sometimes under a new name.
What changes for you
- A short list of priorities that the leadership team has agreed on and defends together.
- Clear reasons for what was not funded, understood by those who lost out.
- Projects that are stopped are actually stopped, and their resources move.
- A way of deciding that also holds in the next planning round.
How we approach it
We look at the portfolio as a whole: which initiatives matter most to the strategy, what each requires to succeed and where resources are genuinely constrained. We work with the leadership team until it has agreed on the criteria, made the trade-offs and is prepared to stand behind the choices together. We also establish a decision process that holds up when powerful sponsors challenge the outcome in the next planning round.
What we clarify first
- Which initiatives would the leadership team defend if it could fund only three?
- What does each initiative really need to succeed, as opposed to what it has asked for?
- Who decides when two division heads cannot agree?
Tell us what’s at stake
Thirty minutes, no pitch. You describe the situation. We tell you honestly whether we can help, and how.