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Integrating corporate strategy and transformation portfolio processes may seem like a daunting task, but the benefits are worth it. Evidence shows that the closer we align strategy development with portfolio delivery, the more strategy we will deliver, and the delta can be significant. Veritas Asia Pacific faces these challenges almost daily and, in a recent engagement with the government, the results were stunning. They again achieved fully articulated and aligned branch strategies, leading to outcome-based budgeting, managing assets and transformation based on finance, risk, reputation, commitments, and a host of other dimensions. Additionally, they aligned the balanced scorecard and saved massively from knowing what to stop doing. Congratulations to Charles and his team, as the provider of the software to support the process we could not be more thrilled with theirs and their client's success. Please keep it up. #strategydevelopment #strategydelivery #portfoliomanagement #Outcomebudgeting #ESG #Riskmanagement

In this article VERITAS shares a case study on how they were able to assist their Client Transport for NSW with the prioritisation of investment opportunities using a new Multi Criteria Decision Making Analysis tool developed by KEPA Software. #transportfornsw #nswgovernment #investment #investmentdecisions #assetmanagement #investmentplanning #budgeting #capitalinvestment #veritas #casestudy #multicriteriadecisionmaking #projectmanagement #projectplanning #transport #infrastructure

What is your top project? How can you tell, which is top and which is next, and so on? You are looking at a standard AppO analysis – It shows the recommended portfolio (or sequence of investment) based on individual stakeholder opinions of the relative importance of value measures such as financial outcomes, ESG, risk, anything you can imagine that generates advantage (Or disadvantage). Not just one top project, one for each stakeholder opinion of what is important......... and AppO can automatically generate the logical consensus position and use that to create another list that would be close to an agreed position. This is just one basic analysis. Others include spending alignment, value for money, pipeline analysis, capital allocation analysis, timeline analysis, opinion divergence analysis, suspected bias analysis, bar charts, pie charts, spider diagrams, and detailed tabular analyses including cost/benefit. But why should you care? How about expected savings between 5% and 23% of your portfolio value? This can produce meaningful outcomes in your organisation within a month. Drop us line if you want to know more.  #portfoliomanagement #portfoliooptimization #programmanagement #prioritization #RelativeBusinessValue #strategydevelopment #capitalplanning

Is “Compliance” a project prioritisation construct? To many inexperienced players the answer is a definitive “YES” when experts will answer with a definitive “NO”. The problem arises from attempts to make a three-step process into a one-step process. People often mistake prioritisation as encompassing selection and scheduling when the correct process sequence is selection, prioritisation, then scheduling. Selection is the part of the process that assesses whether a Candidate meets the basic requirements to enter the Candidate portfolio, prioritisation answers the question “In a perfect world of unlimited resources, time, etc. in what sequence should I invest in the portfolio Candidates?”, then scheduling introduces the real world of resource constraints, compliance, urgency etc. to recommend the executing portfolio. When it comes to the prioritisation question, we believe the Candidate that generates the greatest business value today should be our top priority (Plan A), while the Candidate that generates the next most Business Value should be ‘Plan B’, and so on. To do that you will need a tool and a process that will generate accurate assessments of business value without including scheduling constructs. We have such a tool but there are others and we can help you decide by using our tool to help you compare your options, free of charge. When you have the best tool for you (It is extremely unlikely to be a spreadsheet), and even if you don’t, never include available capital, project inter-dependencies, compliance, urgency, product and asset lifecycles, resource demand and supply, cumulative business impact, and Candidate category as prioritisation constructs, in our world they are never business value measures so should always be treated as scheduling constructs. #Prioritisation #Projectprioritisation #Portfoliomanagement #Strategymanagement #Projectmanagement, #Projectscheduling #Projectselection #Businessprioritisation

Never enough budget to pay for transformation? The C-suite know the problem, allocation of sufficient funds to deliver the transformation agenda, then portfolio management struggles to align delivery with strategy development and according to many pundits over ninety percent of C-suite executives fail to deliver all their strategic agenda. Thinking outside the box you can simplify the problem by truly understanding what business value is available in each investment candidate. In a perfect world a list in descending business value order will give you the sequence in which investments should be made and the lowest on the list are probably where you can make the biggest savings, eliminating high-cost low-value candidates. It doesn’t need to be any more complex than that. A brief search of the internet will show you that if you are unable to produce a statistically defensible and pragmatically supportable list of your transformation candidates in descending business value order then savings available to you are likely to be around twenty percent but there may also be even more available by delivering more of your strategic agenda with the same resources. The article in the Harvard Business Review entitled ‘When You’ve Got to Cut Costs—Now’ will show you that we are not the only ones who know twenty percent is achievable if you “Strive to eliminate any work for which the cost exceeds the value”. You don’t need to spend a lot, you just need the right tools and the right help. We can provide both. Drop us a line, we’ll be happy to show you how to produce that list from what you already have and we’ll show you how to use it, no commitment necessary.  #portfoliomanagement #transformation #strategicmanagement #C-suite #MCDA #budgetingsuccess #projectmanagement https://lnkd.in/gvFGdmAY

Increasing the value delivered from your project portfolio Best practice project portfolio selection and prioritisation introduces us to the world of decision science, which is not studied as part of most tertiary degrees. To us this is a clear mis-spent opportunity to learn how to save at least five percent of the value of the portfolio which can add up to many $Millions per annum. We don’t understand why universities have generally not developed decision science coursework for most business degrees so here are five keys to help you harvest the savings available in your business: 1.      There is NEVER just one candidate solution when making decisions. At a minimum there is always a ‘do nothing’. 2.      Portfolio candidates compete for funding. The one that creates the most value should be the first funded (or Plan A). If Plan A ends up being unrealizable or further funds are available after investing in Plan A, then Plan B should be considered, and so on. 3.      With the need to consider ESG, risk, uncertainty, etc. value can come in a stunning array of measures. Some are tangible, some intangible, some outcomes are positive, some negative. Research shows that if you want your decisions to exclude bias and emotion and be statistically defendable then we must use true multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA). To learn about MCDA please visit https://lnkd.in/g9dB4FiY 4.      Using the right MCDA tool removes what most people who have not studied decision science perceive as complexity. Our advice is to go for one that uses the Analytic Hierarchy Process because it requires the least resources and time to achieve statistically defendable decisions. 5.      You can find MCDA tools with very basic implementations that cost more than USD $1.2 Million for the first three years. Others are feature rich at a fraction of the cost to get superior outcomes in the same timeframe. if you need help finding appropriate tools then drop us a line and we’ll recommend the most appropriate from around the globe to suit your business situation. If you can’t run a reasonable pilot implementation in under a month, if someone is telling you that you need a specialist data science team, or is telling you that real MCDA can be achieved with a spreadsheet or can be developed with under $5 Million, if you need significant volumes of data that you don’t already have in your existing governance processes to begin maturing decision science in your organisation, or if you can’t readily enlist support from the application vendor and independent subject matter experts then we think you are talking to the wrong people.  #investmentdecisions hashtag #assetmanagement hashtag #investmentplanning hashtag #budgeting hashtag #capitalinvestment hashtag #multicriteriadecisionmaking hashtag #portfoliomanagement hashtag #infrastructure