Portfolio Optimisation SPARKS
These are step-by-step guides for the SPARKS (Strategies, Principles, Actions, Reflections, Knowledge, and Success) to optimise the portfolio of work in your organisation. They are used to maximise how value is defined, prioritised, planned, created, and realised. These apply across portfolios of work in all sectors and fields. If you would like more information or would like to chat about how to apply these in your context, please contact us.
10 Tips for Your Portfolio
Do the right work at the right time.
How value is defined, prioritised, planned, created, and realised is the most important thing for any resilient organisation. We wrap up our top ten portfolio optimisation tips in this poster.
These are our top tips to use across your portfolio.
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Lean Budgeting
Follow the money to transformation.
Lean Budgeting, a transformative approach to finance management, draws from the methodologies of Lean Portfolio Management.
Here are the principles and six steps to get started.
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Minimum Viable Bureaucracy (MVB)
Just enough governance.
MVB focuses on streamlining processes, cutting unnecessary red tape, and retaining only the most essential procedures and regulations. Here are our MVB Themes and tips.
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Balanced Scorecard
Mix the right ingredients for your recipe.
A prioritisation tool where work is scored on a variety of perspectives to objectively assess the allocation of time, funding, and people during the planning process.
Step by step to define what is valuable for your organisation and ensure you have the right 'mix' of work.
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Eisenhower Matrix
Strategic urgency and importance.
A strategic version of this simple, yet powerful, prioritisation tool. At a strategic level, the Eisenhower Matrix allows everyone to understand the funding and people allocations.
Using prioritisation to create alignment with stakeholders and drive your portfolio in the right direction.
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How to Plan
It's more complicated than it sounds.
Planning at a portfolio level involves laying out people, projects, programs, and costs using time as a reference point. Constant tradeoffs are made to optimise value.
Using this tool along with prioritisation and estimation (work size) techniques for max effectiveness.
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Scenario Planning
Structured thinking for "what if's".
A strategic planning tool where initiatives are evaluated through the lens of various scenarios to assess impacts on both the initiative and other initiatives in the portfolio.
Use this in conjunction with our Scenario Canvas for maximum effectiveness.
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Theory of Constraints
Every system has them, so exploit them.
The theory that every complex system is limited in achieving more of its goals by a small number of constraints. By identifying and managing these, goal achievement can be maximised.
Five steps to identify and exploit the constraints in your organisation.
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Work Size
Smaller is better; here's why.
The concept of breaking work into smaller units to achieve more outcomes is based on the principle that smaller tasks are more manageable and easier to execute.
Learn how to look at work in different ways and identify patterns to break down the work in your organisation.
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