Why a review?

Most leadership groups already know they have more initiatives running than they can manage. The harder part is saying which ones actually take you where you said you'd go, and which you also have the capacity to carry out. It's rarely the same list.

The goals sit in a strategy document. The projects sit in a project tool. The budget in a third system. Between them is a gap no one really owns, and it's in that gap most decisions are made, on gut feeling, on who argues best, on what happens to sit at the top of someone's list. And even the person genuinely trying to weigh things fairly gets stuck, because one head rarely holds more than a handful of assessment criteria at once, and a portfolio needs more than that.

A ranked list doesn't get you past it. A list answers which initiative is most important, one at a time. But no portfolio delivers one initiative at a time. It delivers in combinations, with dependencies no one holds in their head, and with a capacity that runs out long before the ideas do.

The review puts that whole picture on the table at once, with leadership in the room. Not a report someone writes up afterwards, but work you do yourselves. Our role is to facilitate and document. We lead the workshop and capture what you arrive at, so nothing is lost. You set goals and criteria before the initiatives are known, so the rules can't be shaped to fit the answers. Then the initiatives are assessed against those rules. Finally you go through the picture together, with the simulator in front of you.

It holds because three parts grip into each other. Take one away, and it falls.

No algorithm decides for you. The point is simpler than that. For the first time everyone sees the same picture, knows where they disagree, and can make a decision they can stand behind.

The six parts

We go through the steps one at a time. Each has its own page with an interactive picture.

• 1. Organizational goals
• 2. Business goals
• 3. The criteria
• 4. Initiatives
• 5. Visualizations
• 6. Simulation