Data, experience, and everything in between

Have you also found that the organization struggles to identify the data that would support building a complete picture — one that helps you look at portfolio management from several perspectives at once?

Two kinds of data

Strategic portfolio management rests on two fundamentally different kinds of data.

Generic data — the same regardless of organization

Some fields are the same whether you run a media company, a municipality or an industrial firm:

Name, owner, sponsor, status, budget, start date, cost, dependency, business case.

That is the structure of portfolio management. It looks the same for a global manufacturer as for a regional authority. Standard fields, standard relationships, standard reports. It is the infrastructure of portfolio management.

Organization-specific data — your context, your experience

Then there is the other kind, which is not generic at all. It is data that describes what actually matters to you specifically, and that changes over time:

• Your strategic objectives
• Your decision criteria (legal requirements, ethical limits, market priorities)
• Your feasibility factors (capacity, competence, requirement maturity)
• Your dependencies that don't show up in any system
• Your experience of what actually works

This is data that is dynamic. It changes when your strategy changes. When your market shifts. When leadership changes focus. It cannot be set once and forgotten.

Do you have the data you need?

The honest question, and the honest answer: both yes and no.

Yes — more than you think already exists

Much of what strategic portfolio management requires already exists in your current systems:

• Finance systems track budget, costs and outcomes
• Capacity systems track resources, allocations and availability
• Project systems (Jira, Azure DevOps, etc.) hold status, dependencies and progress
• HR systems track competence and available staff
• Strategy documents hold the goals, even if they live in a PowerPoint

It is about data that lives in different places and doesn't talk to each other.

No — data that can be hard to store in a system

Then there is data that doesn't exist anywhere. Not in Jira, not in Excel, not in anyone's database. It is data that only lives in the heads of experienced decision-makers:

• "We've tried this three times before. It always fails when we go broad before we have a pilot."
• "This supplier delivers on time but quality is uneven — we need to order with margin."
• "When we prioritize international expansion before we have stable internal delivery, it always turns to chaos."
• "This initiative looks good on paper but will never be accepted by the board without a stronger risk analysis."

It is not technical data. It is life and work experience, condensed into intuition. And it is often the most valuable data you have, because it is the data that has learned from your mistakes.

The challenge is how the organization can use that kind of data together with all the data sitting in different support systems — and use it to stop wasting resources.

Imagine if all of this came together

Now picture this. That all these different data sources (structured fields from finance systems, status from Jira, strategic goals from leadership documents, and experience and criteria from your most senior people) could be brought into the same place.

That for the first time you could see the whole portfolio from several perspectives at once:

• Which initiatives matter most strategically?
• Which are feasible given what we know today?
• Which meet our ethical and practical criteria?
• Which have dependencies none of our systems capture?
• Which resemble earlier initiatives that succeeded or failed?

That is what strategy visualization does. A shared picture of the portfolio that leadership can view from several perspectives at once: the strategic, the financial, the delivery, the experience-based. Not a list. A picture you can stand in front of together, point at the same thing, and reason around.

That is what strategic portfolio management is actually about. Not replacing your systems. Not collecting more data. Bringing together what you already have and what you already know, so the whole leadership team can see the same thing at the same time.

When this isn't the right tool for you

To be honest: this doesn't work for everyone.

If your portfolio consists of three parallel assignments and you all talk every day, you don't need a system to collect data. The hallway is enough.

If your organization has never explicitly discussed strategic objectives, if no one knows what a "decision criterion" is, or if your senior people aren't interested in sharing their experience — then there is underlying work to do first. That work cannot be replaced by a tool.

But for organizations with 30+ active initiatives, existing project systems, and a leadership team frustrated that their experienced colleagues' insights never show up in prioritization decisions — the question is no longer whether you have the data.

The question is what you can do with the data once it is brought together.