.png)
Setting Roadmaps
Next the business leader builds a high-level roadmap of strategic change in terms of specific business capabilities, providing clarity to upstream and downstream stakeholders on what needs to change, and how much will be made available in support of the changes.
Often, the business leaders will sponsor a portfolio management functional context (see Strategic Portfolio Management Playbook) to be responsible for facilitating the function that rationalizes the portfolio of specific investments (i.e. initiatives) that fund changes in the business capabilities.
A context’s roadmap should be publicly (and easily) accessible across the organization. Make it as easy as clicking a link.
Find Initiatives
Business leaders use their understanding of the needs for business capabilities, and the investment themes set by the levers, to establish success Criteria for ideation. These criteria publish the factors that define “good” for an investment idea. It is critical that this is done before the ideas start coming in.
Next the business leader and/or portfolio manager creates or employs a system that can cast a wide net across stakeholders and SMEs and other employees to collect Ideas. The business leaders and/or portfolio manager vets these ideas continuously, against the criteria and expected investment levels, to narrow down to a set of promising Opportunities, for further consideration. Opportunities are assessed for uncertainty (“what do we know that we don’t know?”), then curated as Hypotheses to frame the investment with an experimental mindset. In some cases, when uncertainty is low, the opportunity can be immediately drafted as an Initiative that changes a capability. This results in a set of initiatives, which pair up a specific change-need with a corresponding willingness-to-spend budget. Some initiatives will be supported with a hypothesis, while others may not.
Target investment/spend dates for each initiative (and for each related investment theme) in rough horizons or timeframes like “Now”, “Next”, and “Later”. When dependencies drive a need for tighter synchronization, these Roadmaps can be refined to show initiatives (fueling execution) against dates on a timeline. Roadmaps are a communication tool used to show intent and help manage dependencies within the organization, and with customers.
Frame Next Quarter
Initiatives provide fuel for learning across the business. Learning is achieved when we see evidence that our capability enhancements are enabling the business to win.
A quick sidebar on the relationship between Contexts and Teams:
A team is a small group of people who:
- Share a set of goals
- Share a backlog of work
- Share a way of working (from stand-ups to configuration mgmt)
- Share the authority to make changes (both to assets and to their practices)
Leaders in contexts make decisions to create strategy. Members of teams make changes to improve assets. Some contexts are vast enough, that they require leadership teams that treat the work of decision making as work (i.e. in a backlog) and the strategy as an asset to change. Most teams have leadership in place, but do not require a dedicated context to set their decision authority and manage a strategy.
Contexts allocate much of their budget to sponsor existing (or form new) Teams that support the context’s goals. A common pattern is a context that sponsors (i.e. funds) 3-5 teams to execute its strategy and responsibilities.
If there are child contexts receiving budget from this business context, then they might have leadership teams that meet the definition of team. In other cases, it is just a single leader of context, with no team. For example, a child context supporting a product, led by a product triad (serving as a leadership team), would be a case where this business context sponsors the product leadership team (and funds the members of that leadership team directly with its budget).
Make the initiative funding available to the recipients (i.e. product leaders or program leaders) to fuel their planning for the next quarter (e.g. new teams or new purchases). Focus on the initiatives that are active or targeted in the next quarter. Work with downstream stakeholders (i.e. the contexts you are investing in) to arrive at short-term Sub-Goals that can be achieved with the next quarter’s spend (within the overall investment). For innovation-driven, start-up style investments, the goals might look like venture capital milestones, for renewed investment. For large programs, the goals might look like limited pilot results. For small, simple projects, then goals might be the whole result: the benefits of the enhanced capability. These sub-goals will trace up to the business’s overall strategic goals for the next year.
Supplementing the sub-goals with observable (and ideally measurable) Desired Outcomes sets the stage for short feedback loops of learning, which is powerful for any kind of initiative. Focus on these specifying these results (outcomes) instead of specifying the exact details of the needed changes (e.g. new product features, or specific implementations of changes in capabilities).
Ask the downstream recipients of the investment to start thinking in small Bets against an initiative’s hypothesis (or any hypotheses that came out of recent scenario planning), and set (aggressive) expectations that recipients should strive to maximize the learning and minimize the spend.
.png)
Comments & Feedback: