Strategy and its implementation are often not connected in the day-to-day operations of many organizations. By deploying portfolio management from your organization’s strategic objectives, work is prioritized for added value, in line with business strategy. In this way, strategy and execution do connect.
Last June, we hosted one of our Executive Round Tables on the topic of Change Portfolio Management. It turned out to be a hit because portfolio management is such a hot topic for many organizations. Because of the speed of change, organizations feel they need “something” to have a handle on their change programs. During this Round Table, we also noticed that there is a particular need for knowledge about how, as a manager, you can concretely connect your organization’s strategy with its execution. The how and why of this connection and the key role of portfolio management in this is what this blog is about. During the Round Table, we found out that:
- the vast majority of employees do not know the strategy of organization.
- the vast majority of CEOs do not know what their own employees are doing on a daily basis.
Making choices is prioritizing
Change portfolio management is sometimes called the wheel of change and improvement because it is to drive and manage the necessary changes within the organization. It is designed to help organizations get on with the right things. After all, as a manager or CEO, you always have to deal with limiting factors such as time and money. That’s why you have to make the right choices. To make the right choices, it is important to know what your organization is currently working on and its capacity for change. So you can connect strategy with execution. Here it is important to realize that:
- your change organization is always developing changes.
- your operational organization that needs to implement and use changes or improvements.
Change and Run
To give an example: when developing an application, you want to track the progress of the development process: which functionality is ready and which is not yet (the change organization). Then, when using the application, to look at: have we developed the application properly and, not unimportantly; is the application delivering for us what we expect? (The run organization.) What is important here is that you want to be able to oversee and manage this entire process of development and use. You want to be able to roll up the process all the way to the management level with all the associated relevant steering data.
The benefit to your organization
To maintain your right to exist as an organization, you must constantly invent and deliver new products and services. In doing so, seeing and seizing opportunities is vital. Portfolio management guides this process. It allows organizations to share and connect vision and strategy. Because making and maintaining this connection is so complex (because constantly changing), you can hardly do it without a good tool, such as Targetprocess, the management system we provide at Synergio. Working on the basis of change portfolio management has two major advantages:
- It encourages managers to first make choices about what is and is not important. So priorities first. In doing so, ask yourself the question, “what doesn’t need to be done first?” or, in other words, “maximize the work not done. Only then can you focus on something and thereby make a difference. Managers who work according to this simple methodology find that what they say has more impact within their organization.
- Change portfolio management allows employees responsible for development to plan their own work, making it clear to management what everyone is currently working on and what stage of the development process different parts of the organization are currently in.
Making mistakes is necessary
An important part of change portfolio management is how you handle errors as an organization. Because making mistakes is the only way you can discover what works and what doesn’t. Learning from “mistakes” made will help you know how to do better next time. Important for the development of an organization is that management does not punish mistakes but rather encourages them. For example, by establishing a playful prize for The Mistake Of The Month. The message then is: making mistakes is no big deal. But be responsible for your mistakes; share them with others and learn from them together. This applies not only to portfolio management but actually to everything you do in an organization.
Want to spar?
Want to know what change portfolio management can do for your organization? Feel free to call us for a no-obligation consultation. We are happy to think with you.
We are Synergio. And this is what we offer our customers:
- Effective Portfolio Management.
- Continuously create added value.
- Continuous learning and improvement.
- High performing teams
