Is 2025 going to be the year of Portfolio Transformation?
I posted on LinkedIn last week (see post here) that we seem to be running out of weeks in the year and a very insightful friend of Definia made an interesting comment which aligned whole-heartedly with our thinking…
“My observation of what is driving the pressure that makes time disappear is that I think we are all faced with the challenge of trying to maintain fast-paced delivery over 52 weeks, but the reality is that we have to shoehorn everything into 40 available weeks, once we remove major holiday periods.
The golden nugget is how we establish a model where all stakeholders sign up to what is the art of the possible given this challenge.”
As a Dad, and within a household of four children at school and pre-school age, I should have known this already but reading this and reflecting on the past 12 months of delivery it really does make sense. Maybe we should all reflect on this with a ‘kinder’ outlook on what we have achieved this year (rather than cynicism and/or criticism that we haven’t delivered enough in the time available)?
It’s also resonates a key request we are seeing from a number of our clients – helping them to truly establish a demand pipeline and build/execute the portfolio effectively, consistently and with accuracy. In a world of hybrid/remote working and changing make-up of transformation teams (see earlier blogs) we are seeing an increase in requests by our clients in helping them to shape their transformation portfolio.
We’ve created a transition roadmap to establish, implement and adopt this following 6 really simple-sounding steps (it’s the expert in execution that makes it simple!):
Ultimately our aim in this is to ‘calm the noise’ – often a real issue when the pressure is on from the business to deliver change. And the simple approach on this is to provide a baseline for common understanding and agree collective priorities, provide reporting and insight across the portfolio to support stakeholder conversations and establish and implement priority interventions with pathways to green where needed.
I appreciate this sounds simple in practice – as with all of our work we do with clients, it is the expertise and experience that we bring to blend into your organisation which add the significant value (otherwise business transformation would be easy and we could all ‘ChatGPT’ it…right?).
In our experience, this is as much an exercise in meaningful engagement across the business and support functions as it is process. It will only succeed with clear leadership support from the top team and delivering a transparent view of the collective ask, set against available resourcing, leads to the harder (and sometimes cathartic) process of prioritisation. We have witnessed some interesting debates around the executive and/or board tables once all stakeholders have visibility of their counterparts’ priorities and change agendas.
And critically, in amongst all the excellent work required to embed this approach, it is vital to ensure that the organisation’s culture is taken into account as often this will be the barrier to, or accelerator of, real and meaningful progress. New technology capabilities such as neurotech are enabling us to have a more insightful view of the cultural enablers and barriers than ever before.
Please do reach out to us if you think this approach would help to address your pain points around managing your portfolio delivery and feel free to comment with your own opinions, thoughts, hints and tips….! And good luck to all of those who are trying to establish this ‘baseline’ within the noise. We feel your pain and remember to be kind to yourself in the process.
My thanks,
Will
