Got a ‘Winning’ Strategic Portfolio? Use the 6 Characteristics to Find Out

For an organization to be confident of realizing its strategic ambitions, a portfolio of strategic priorities, projects and initiatives must be more than the sum of its parts. With this in mind, we are also going to look at the health of the portfolio, as well as its performance.

As a portfolio is more than a collection of individual initiatives, we are going to explore the composition or make-up of the strategic portfolio.  This includes whether the portfolio is aligned, integrated and balanced.

To think like a Wall Street investor we will explore the performance, health and synergy of the strategic portfolio under 6 headings as follows:

The 6 factors above characterize a winning strategic portfolio – one that is likely to best advance the organization’s strategy and its prosperity too.

Use the 6 factors to explore the health and performance of your strategic portfolio and how likely it is to deliver on your strategy. As you review each of these factors, identify any areas where there may be gaps in respect of strategic portfolio management.

Let’s explore each of these 6 areas in turn.

How Healthy are the Strategic Portfolio’s Vital Statistics?

In assessing a strategic portfolios performance and health let’s start by gathering some vital statistics, including:

• How many priorities/projects are ‘live’ and in the pipeline? 
• What is the overall investment in projects? What is the expected payback?
• What percentage of priorities/projects are performing and are struggling? 
• What percentage of priorities/projects are at the first mile and last mile?
• How is the list of priorities/projects segmented in terms of importance, spend, functional area and so on?

These ‘vital statistics’ will help in providing a contextualized view of the health of the strategic portfolio.  Moreover, the act of gathering this information will, of itself, improve the level of visibility and oversight of the project portfolio, as the following examples suggest:

‘We use the word ‘project’ for everything – from a piece of work that one person is doing to a cross functional initiative with a big budget and dedicated resources’ said one frustrated leader.  ‘However, once we arrived at an internal definition of what a ‘project’ actually is, we calculated a total of real 230 projects that are presently underway across the division’.

‘To be ‘valid’ or ‘real’ a project must have a documented business case, but of the 150 or so projects underway, it would appear than less than 10% actually have one on paper.  This calls into question how the success (or otherwise) of these projects will be measured.’

‘Only 10% of projects had more than one department or function as the sponsor.  This raised concerns about a siloed approach to critical projects whose success would require effective cross-functional collaboration.’

How Aligned is Your Strategic Portfolio?

Is there internal consistency within the strategic portfolio? This means ensuring that projects and initiatives are not ‘at odds with’, but compliment and reinforce each other.  They are aligned with strategy and consistent with the overall vision, the needs of the business and the realities of its market.  Moreover, that the allocation of people and other resources to projects matches words with deeds in terms of the organization’s stated strategic priorities.

Failure to adopt a portfolio mindset, neglects interdependencies as well as synergies across projects. Projects that span departments and functions amplify this challenge. HR has its projects and IT its projects too.  This is situation is replicated across Finance, Marketing, Operations and all the other functions too. 

How Balanced is Your Strategic Portfolio?

Is there an appropriate mix or spread of projects or initiatives within the portfolio:

• Spanning different time horizons – short, medium and long term¹.  In addition to delivering short term gains in efficiency and performance to meet this year’s target, longer term projects must ‘pay it forward’ investing in those areas that will sustain performance into the longer term and enable the business to cope with future disruption and change.
  
• Addressing core, adjacent and new areas of the business (capabilities, products, technologies, markets, etc.)². Another way of describing this would be business as usual (i.e. concerned with the everyday running of the business) or business unusual (a departure from the everyday running of the business concerned with new processes, products, markets and technologies)?

Similar to a financial investment portfolio of stocks and shares, some projects or initiatives may promise a high reward but entail high levels of risk.  Other projects or initiatives may be low risk but deliver only low returns.  The balance between the two determines whether a strategic portfolio would be described as ‘conservative’, ‘moderate’ or ‘aggressive’.³

Ideally a strategic portfolio would be a hybrid or mix of both conservative, moderate and aggressive initiatives in order to deliver on the strategy as well as the longer-term vision.  Use the table overleaf to find out which of these labels best describes your portfolio.

The mix of projects in a strategic portfolio reflects not just the level of ambition of the organization’s vision or strategy, but also its appetite for innovation, risk or disruption. 

Explore the balance within your strategic portfolio in 3 steps:

Step 1: Give each strategic priority, initiative or project a number based on its position on the grid (above).  For example:

• A priority/initiative likely to deliver in the short term and focused on the core business (e.g. optimizing existing processes) would be a ‘1’
• A longer-term initiative focused on new technologies is a ’9’. 

Step 2: Add all the numbers across the portfolio and divide by the number of projects to find the average. 

Step 3: Use the table to find out what it reveals about your portfolio:

As a rough ‘rule of thumb’ a number close to ‘5’ can be seen to indicate a balanced portfolio.

How Integrated is Your Strategic Portfolio?

Looking at individual priorities or initiatives (even critical ones) in isolation risks missing the bigger picture.  You need to zoom out to see patterns across a bundle or portfolio of projects and initiatives, also to leverage synergies or manage interdependencies between individual projects. Running lots of standalone projects in isolation of each other results in missed opportunities.

Is your strategic portfolio a collection of individual initiatives, or is it more? While projects and initiatives may cover a wide gambit in terms of different departments, functions, goals and timelines some integration is important.  For example:

• Are projects woven into the overall strategic agenda?
• Is care taken to leverage any synergies and interdependencies between projects?
• How effective is collaboration between project teams?
• Is organizational learning deliberately harvested across the portfolio? 
• Do projects span departments and functions – uniting them in the realization of shared objectives and requiring effective cross-functional collaboration?
• Are projects united through a common vision and shared framework or set of principles underpinning their success?

Does Your Strategic Portfolio Stretch Your Organization?

Ideally, the strategic portfolio should also stretch and challenge the organization, testing the limits of its ambition and the vision of its future. It must balance the predictability of business usual, with the need to embrace and shape the future through change and innovation (business unusual). 

Complex and innovative projects will inevitably challenge, stretch and even strain the organization:

• Exciting the visionary, while threatening the more traditional
• Generating tension between the old and the new
• Creating perceived winners and losers
• Putting the optimists up against the cynics
• Aggravating rifts and tensions, as well as issues of personalities and politics
• Challenging long held beliefs and organizational dogma (or groupthink)
• Challenging old ways of working and chaffing against the traditional hierarchy
• Creating confusion and ambiguity where there was once order and certainty.

How do you know if your portfolio stretches your organization? 

Well, look for projects or initiatives on the grid that fall anywhere between 5 and 9.  In particular, lookout for 9s on the grid.     

In the 9^th box you will find what Harvard MBA Graduates call ‘Blue Ocean’ strategies, ‘Inflection Points’ and even ‘Moonshots’.

If this grid was an early map of the world, then the 9^th box is where the text ‘here there be dragons’ might be added.  Projects here are business unusual, rather than business as usual.  They entail high levels of risk and uncertainty and are laden with hypothesis and assumptions. However, it is here that the most ambitious strategies are likely to emerge.  It is here that the potential for hockey stick or 10x levels of growth exists.

Recognizing that the organization can only see so far into the future, some projects in the 9^th box are exploratory or speculative.  For example, a longer-term initiative focused on a new technology, product or channel. Such ‘strategic experiments’ are vehicles for learning and innovation. They embrace uncertainty, testing assumptions and hypotheses about the future.

Is the Strategic Portfolio Prioritized & Sequenced?

With many strategic priorities, projects and initiatives competing for scarce time and attention it is important that projects are prioritized and sequenced with resources being allocated for maximum impact and the necessary trade-offs being made. 

By prioritizing and sequencing those projects that matter most, the organization:

• Ensures that priorities & initiatives must compete for resources & attention
• Focuses attention and aligns resources in line with the strategy or vision 
• Prevents a proliferation of projects and dissipation of effort and resources
• Connects projects and initiatives to business impact and success
• Ensures that the timing is right in terms of the window of opportunity and the readiness of the organization.

Not all projects can or should go ahead and certainly not at the same time.  The organization must invest its resources in those projects and initiatives that can most impact the success of the business and its strategy. 

Nothing signals a lack of clarity or alignment regarding strategy, like a proliferation of projects.  Yet, decisions to fund one project over another can be mired by politics and other forms of bias.