Setting Roadmaps

Next the portfolio manager refines and baselines the portfolio, providing clarity to upstream and downstream stakeholders on what needs to change, and how much will be spent in support of the changes.

A context’s roadmap should be publicly (and easily) accessible across the organization. Make it as easy as clicking a link.

Find Initiatives

Portfolio Managers use their understanding of the needs for business capabilities, and the investment themes set by the business context’s 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.

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Try this:

Structure a deliberative Decision to lock down the Criteria. Frame the decision as “What criteria should we use to compare change ideas for improving business capabilities this year?”

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Decision Architecture tip:

Invite your stakeholders and SMEs into a dialog using Nominal Group Collaboration.

Nominal Group Collaboration

Nominal group collaboration is a method of group decision making that involves structured, anonymous input from all members to generate a representative group viewpoint

Learn more ->

Next the portfolio manager creates or employs a system that can cast a wide net across stakeholders and SMEs and other employees to collect Ideas. The 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, however. This results in a set of initiatives, which pair up a specific change-need with a corresponding willingness-to-spend spending constraint. Some initiatives will be supported with a hypothesis, while others may not.

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Decision Architecture tip:

Practice discussing uncertainty across the leadership team, to (1) strengthen psychological safety and (2) bring the right evaluation approach to the opportunity.

Rumsfeld Matrix

Categorizes information into known knowns, known unknowns, unknown knowns, and unknown unknowns, helping navigate uncertainty and uncover risks

Learn more ->

The emerging set of initiatives is continuously consolidated, rationalized, and prioritized as a portfolio, to balance against the constraints of the organization, and show alignment with the business strategy.

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Try this:

Structure a deliberative Decision to decide how to prioritize initiatives. Frame the decision as “What factors should we use to prioritize initiatives and target them on the roadmap?”

These priorities are reflected in the target investment/spend dates for each initiative, 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 support dependency management across the organization, and with customers.

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Try this:

Work with the business stakeholders to decide on Criteria, then launch an Idea campaign with a targeted set of stakeholders and SMEs to build a set of Opportunities. Capture each of the 10 most-promising opportunities on their own shared doc. Invite stakeholders and SMEs to contribute open questions (”what we don’t know”) to each doc, to help portfolio leaders gauge the uncertainty for each opportunity.

Build Hypotheses for opportunities (in the shared doc) with significant uncertainty. Build Initiatives (with proposed funding constraints and timeframes) for opportunities (in the shared doc) with low uncertainty. Rationalize, consolidate, and prioritize the top new opportunities against the active work in progress and capacity constraints (i.e. in a shared sheet) to update the Roadmap (i.e. in a slide or roadmapping tool).

Frame Next Quarter

Initiatives provide fuel for learning. Learning is achieved when we see evidence that our capability enhancements are enabling the business to win. Shift the focus to 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 portfolio’s overall strategic goals for improving the capabilities for the business over the next year. And don’t forget to create some sub-goals for the quarter for the portfolio leadership team as well (e.g. producing a roadmap update by a certain date as a certain cost).

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 (the outputs, which are typically changes in some other contexts’ assets).

Ask the downstream recipients of the investment to frame these short-term desired outcomes as Bets against an initiative’s hypothesis, with aggressive expectations that maximize the learning and minimize the spend.

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Try this:

Facilitate the creation of Sub-Goals by product leaders, program leaders, or project leaders (i.e. the recipients of the initiative funding) to frame learning targets for the next quarter. Ask: How can they leverage the money to buy some knowledge and reduce uncertainty over the next three months? Seek small Bets, where you can buy some knowledge, and further clarify the original opportunity.

Co-create Desired Outcomes as a proposed agenda for the demos at the end of the quarter, where the product, program, or project leads will show business leaders the teams’ outputs and discuss whether the desired outcomes were achieved.

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Decision Architecture tip:

Use Value Engineering to track Bets against Hypotheses.

Value Engineering

Evidence-based decision making designed to help an organization make better decisions through a process of hypothesis testing and experimentation.

Learn more ->

Lastly, survey the Dependencies that exist between active initiatives, specifically dependencies that introduce risk in the next quarter. Manage and mitigate the risks derived from the dependencies on behalf of the leaders driving the specific initiatives.

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Try this:

While the sub-goals are created, dependencies on other products and programs will emerge. Track (and manage the risks associated with) dependencies. Add a weekly ceremony to collect, track, and resolve dependencies across the portfolio.

Setting Roadmaps

Find Initiatives

Nominal Group Collaboration

Rumsfeld Matrix

Frame Next Quarter

Value Engineering

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