For many organizations, strategic planning and delivery has been a significant problem in the past. And while much of the focus is placed on the ability of those organizations to execute on their strategic plans, the issue for many has been that those plans were never realistic in the first place. Approving too much work, prioritizing initiatives that simply can’t contribute to the goals and objectives, and failing to align investments with priorities have all contributed to recurring issues.
That’s one of the major reasons why strategic portfolio management or SPM has become more popular in the last few years. By directly connecting priorities, investments, work delivery and outcomes; and by driving everything directly from those strategic priorities, organizations are beginning to address some of their planning challenges. But there is still a need to ensure that the right investments are approved and funded, get that wrong and it doesn’t matter how well the work is executed.
There are a number of different models designed to help organizations in this prioritization process. These models are designed to balance a number of different factors and aid in the selection of the right balance of investments. Take RICE for example: this model is designed to consider reach, impact, confidence and effort. The first two factors focus on the solution itself, the third on the organization’s ability to deliver, and the fourth on the cost – how much of the available resource will be required.
Another model, often associated with the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is weighted shortest job first (WSJF), and is designed to help organizations to schedule and sequence work. This goes beyond simple prioritization and looks at how to fit work into a given time period based on optimizing benefits while minimizing the cost of any delay.
More simply, value vs. effort simply is a model that seeks to prioritize the work that delivers the most value for the least effort. This is a more structured version of the informal approach that many organizations have attempted to apply in the past, with that structure helping to eliminate mistakes and missteps.
Success for organizations doesn’t come from choosing one of these models and applying it consistently. It comes from the ability to use each of these models in parallel, providing different perspectives on proposed investments and providing a comprehensive modeling approach that helps ensure that the most appropriate investments are approved and funded, giving the portfolio the best possible launch in pursuit of the organization’s goals and objectives.
But how can an organization do that? Applying multiple models to multiple potential portfolio mixes can be a complex, time consuming process.
ServiceNow’s SPM solution includes all three of the models we’ve discussed – RICE, WSJF, and value vs. effort as out of the box functionality. Organizations can easily develop multiple proposed portfolio mixes, apply the models to them and determine the optimal portfolio, and portfolio schedule, based on the ability to achieve outcomes, the ability to deliver, and the best utilization of resources. To hear more from the experts on how to best apply the different methodologies, check out the just released Enterprise Podcast episode on Ranking & Scoring.
