DD
Part 2:
For quite a while now, I’ve worked on and off with the lads at Transparent Choice trying to come up with an alignment of project prioritisation and strategic objective prioritisation (with focus on mission critical objectives)
In the BIG Book Club session on information and data yesterday, we got onto the topic of prioritisation, and we surfaced a real contrast in opinions.
Here is the event report:
Information, Data, and Decisions - big-cic.org/blog
In my view - in order to get (mission critical) objectives through the organisation is via a cascade of objectives and sub objectives.
The problem is - that cascade is not always available (in existence) - neither is a strategy of substance to underpin the cascade.
Steve and I discussed this point at the Conference Session last year, and recognised that P3 professionals still have to get on and help the decision making about which projects to do.
The P3 solution is to develop “strategic drivers” that provide a “pseudo-strategy” which a Portfolio Office can facilitate with executives to enable investment / project scoring and selection. This tries to map upwards - which is fine if that is all you can do - but it can explain the mismatch of strategy and delivery.
(An issue remains regarding capacity - but let’s park that for now)
My concern is - that without the objective cascade alongside the scoring mechanism - we do not really have the golden thread from strategy to delivery and back again.
So what to do?
It seems to me - from much discussion - P3 professionals are reticent to raise issues regarding absence of strategy or strategic objectives. Neither do they feel that raising this would have any effect, other than to make them enemies.
My suggestion then - to P3 professionals - is to not give up on getting the connection of strategy to delivery solved. Instead, take a pragmatic approach that you can effect from the P3 position:
Step 1 - Project Prioritisation. To get the job of selecting done, establishing ‘drivers’ and starting the conversation strategy delivery
Step 2 - Objective cascade. Supplement the drivers based prioritisation with objectives breakdown and allocation to delivery entities as part of accountability. Off the back of Step 1 - this is the first challenge to the absence of strategy and objectives.
Step 3 - Start to select mission critical objective (MCOs) driving projects using their connection to MCOs and drivers directly related to objectives. This starts to bring the OKR cascade into the governance and accountability process.
Step 4 - extend this logic to objectives and workloads which are not delivered by project. This will complete the prioritisation picture, and mean we don’t have to rely on “capacity” for the portfolio - but agree allocations of capacity based on objective-based priority across all workloads.
Furthermore - my proposition is that while an organisation may have a fine strategy developed, and a fine group of managers who can deliver - there is often a gap in the middle layer - implementation - setting up the governance operation to connect strategy to delivery and back again, establishing accountability, prioritising etc.
I don’t think this approach conflicts with any P3 based accepted thinking - and in fact embraces Managing Portfolios - but I think starts to connect more strongly with strategy and governance worlds…
I was thinking of a workshop mid May where we together work on the points together and orchestrate a panel discussion to get our points across - and I hope - get definitive about the connection between strategy and delivery.
If you would like to me invited as a panelist - not an attendee - please let me know.
To develop this discussion - may I invite you into the BIG Community forum, where you will see a copy of this note, and a place to comment and raise / critique any points you see.
@simon @Greg_Krawczyk @DanD @DavidBooth @Veronica @Alex_Shapley
