What are the seven key elements required for successful strategy realization?
Element 7: Business Intelligence
There are seven core elements, all of which are essential to achieve portfolio success – and we will discuss each in turn in this series of blog posts.
These seven core elements – pictured above as a hub and six surrounding spokes, are not only vital, but more importantly, must all work together to form a cohesive unit. There is a need for a constant feedback loop so that data, information, knowledge, and understanding can flow through and connect the whole process. It is only when all those ingredients are present that real competitive advantage can be achieved.
Business Intelligence: helping you to analyse, quantify and manage risk.
Business Intelligence and analytics is imperative when trying to manage uncertainty; Your ability to assess the probability of success of projects will be more objective, with judgments based on facts. It enables you to evaluate all technical and commercial factors that influence the likelihood of project success, and therefore your forward planning will be more robust and realistic.
An integrated business intelligence solution is key when it comes to decision making, providing one source of the truth. When a manager responds to a risk or revises a forecast, the impact is immediately reflected in the portfolio – meaning you can base decisions on reality.
Business Intelligence and Collaboration.
Collaboration and effective communication are key. But to have effective collaboration and communication you need project managers and team members to have access to a shared knowledge base where they can engage, communicate, and share across the entire innovation pipeline. Cross-functional collaboration and high-quality information collection ensures that everyone has access to the most up-to-date information and resources, maintained and updated in real-time.
Not only does this mean that project managers and team members can quickly and easily share key documents, spreadsheets and project plans; It also means goals are clearer and there is greater visibility or strategic objectives and priorities.
All the information you need, in one place.
It is imperative you manage uncertainty in an objective way, with judgements based on facts. The most up-to-date risk analysis tools will use multiple criteria – technical and commercial – to give you an informed assessment. These assessments are combined with financial analytics to enable you to see which projects offer best return versus risk trade-off and help you manage and track specific risks and issues that affect a project.
By considering both technical and commercial factors that influence the likelihood of project success, your forward planning will be more accurate.
Interactive reports and charts can deliver rich and focused information on all projects in the portfolio. Reports should cover all the vital KPIs, financial, categorization and status type information. Visualization formats that prove insightful include portfolio bubble chart, waterfall, pie chart, line, bar, Gantt, pipeline chart and many others.
The use of interactive dashboards to track and manage the portfolio is highly recommended. They provide an informative visual summary of KPIs across the portfolio. You can drill down to detail, get numeric tabular reports, slice and dice the data. Having an extensive suite of visual options, you can get the most effective visual display of information.
We are in an amazingly complex and surprising world. Strategy must be brought into the realm of doing. It seems so obvious, but the hard bit is accomplishing it.
The brave new offerings of Strategy Execution Management tools offer promise, though many of these prove to be quite simplistic in nature. Often not much more than communication tools to cascade the strategy ideas to a larger number of corporate people. You need a bolder approach – an approach that enables you to craft the tools and processes you need so that real strategic insight and action can become an intrinsic part of the fabric of the enterprise.
To find out how GenSight can help you, follow us online, or request your free product demonstration:
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GenSight has helped leading global corporations achieve transformational business results through the implementation of our Portfolio Management solution. We offer a complete solution that includes business process, software and integration into the DNA of the organization.
The GenSight solution enables you to select the portfolio of projects that deliver the greatest contribution to your business, achieves the desired balance, optimizes the use of limited resources…and translates your strategy to action.
Every implementation of the GenSight Portfolio Management solution is custom configured expressly for each client’s specific needs and requirements.
Whether applying GenSight to a single department, business unit, or the entire corporate portfolio of projects, we deliver proven best practices and experience to rapidly elevate your organization’s Portfolio Management capability.
Articles from this series:
Element 1: Portfolio Management
Element 2: The Innovation Process
