Portfolio Prioritisation

So, you have loads of great ideas flooding in and you’ve gathered some basic information about them  (see my last couple of posts on these topics), but how do you prioritise them to form the right, most effective portfolio of activity. 

Ideally your organisation will have split up its portfolio into a set of sub-portfolios (by type of activity, such as core, adjacent and transformational, by strategic objective, or something relevant to the organisation) and each of these will have a clearly defined amount of resource for it (people and money). If this is the case then each will need their own prioritisation criteria and weighting set. For example, if you have a Core portfolio with £35m of capital as its investment for the year, and an objective to optimisation existing services for existing customers in order to increase retention, then a financial benefits measure may have a lower weighting than a customer satisfaction / retention measure, though you’d likely want one to lead to the another. 

There isn’t a standard list of criteria an organisation should use to prioritise, it should be specific and relevant to them, but they will often include financial and non-financial benefits related to strategic objectives and targets, implementation and organisational risk factors, customer (internal and external) measures, cost, and change impact. With the right validated data, you can then give an activity a simple score, its priority. 

Once you have this you can then see where this new activity sits in priority order of the in-flight and existing sequenced activity. Don't make the mistake however of thinking that you can simply sequence your portfolio by priority alone - you need to consider key linked dependent activity which may well be lower priority but must happen ahead of higher priority items, there may be key resource constraints on priority items which mean its worth pursuing a lower priority activity because resource is available for it, and how about when a new idea has a higher priority than an existing in-flight activity, do you stop the in-flight to make way for the new one…perhaps one to draw out in a future post.  

What criteria does your organisation use to prioritise ideas? Does your organisation have multiple sub-portfolios or does it try and prioritise everything in one portfolio?