Problem statement
In every org I've ever been (and believe me, that's a fair few), enterprise planning and prioritization has been a challenge. A number of competing approaches come together to make the spiderweb of entangled quarks.
- We know that strategic priorities and initiatives are supposed to flow down from the overall enterprise level strategic objectives, the 'big ideas' that our C-suite defines. However, often these are so high level or vague, that they are hard to translate into something that anyone could action, estimate the funds required, or who would champion them. They are also often multi-year ambitions and focus areas, that are hard to include in the Annual Operating Planning (AOP) exercise.
- We also know, that product managers prepare vision statements and roadmaps for their products, which provides a 'bottom-up' view of planned items. These may have an ROI estimate and value statement.
- Some initiatives have dependencies, pre-requisities. This means that, unless the initiative without which this initiative cannot start, is approved - there is no point in prioritizing or funding this one.
- Most initiatives will require labour, and often labour with a specific skillset or area of knowledge. Many initiatives may be competing for the same skill set, and there is no point approving all of them, if only a few can actually succeed.
So we often end up in a 'chicken-and-egg' situation especially where the high level strategic objectives meet the bottom-up feature roadmaps or departmental investment areas.
- There are far too many proposals on the table, and they are at very different levels of granularity, to be able to easily prioritize. Even if we use the traditional categorization (regulatory requirement, business or competitive value, ROI, risk reduction, 'must do' or 'keep the lights on ', etc) and even if we give these categories a weighting factor, leadership can be bogged down for many meetings to discuss relative value of the initiatives without really being able to make a decision.
- To assess feasibility, we may need to know details of an initiative (cost, labour required, dependencies) but this may take an investment of time we don't want to make until we know the priority
- Different departments may have different priorities. And an initiative for one department or group may need effort, input execution, or have some other dependency on another group. If this second group does not prioritize this, why even attempt to start this work?
- Many competing initiatives may have a dependency on a few scarce resources - a cyber assessment by the experts, legal opinion, or something only Jolene can do. For any of these initiatives, we should only approve those that fit within the capacity of this scarce resource. We end up with a matrix of competing priorities by resource, with downstream ripple effects
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