The old quote that “those who can’t remember. The past are condemned to repeat it” has been heard by every history student or consumer of political oratory past their teenage years. The lesson of the quote, that the events of the past hold lessons relevant to the future. Is a good one that shouldn’t be lost on technology leaders.
As the year winds down and a new year begins. Most organizations’ focus is on dispensing with the past as quickly as possible.
A Strategy without the Past is no Strategy at all
This zeal for the future often extends to the strategic planning exercises that accompany a new calendar year. Perhaps it’s human nature to close out the past.
This review should include at least 3 elements:
- An analysis of the market and external environment over the last 12 months. What significant changes occurred across technology, markets, and society?
- How did your portfolio of strategic projects fare over the past year? What were the primary causes of the successes and failures? Were they due to an internally-driven reason like budget or an external factor that you articulated in your analysis of the external environment?
Reflecting on the Environment
Strategies and long-range plans can’t exist in a vacuum, a fact that has been dramatically illustrated over the past 2 years when COVID foisted lasting changes on everything from how and where we work to the reliability and design of our supply chains. Spending the time in your annual review to examine the shifts in the environment is not only a study of history but an examination of how your strategy fared against environmental elements that were both predicted and out of the left field.
Understanding environmental events both inside and outside your company also provides critical information to determine how your strategy performed when accounting for these events. For example, a strategy to roll out new technology to support in-person live events that launched in early 2020 was unlikely to be successful no matter how wonderful the technology or skillful the implementation team was.
Analyzing Your Portfolio Performance
Most organizations already have tools and methods for tracking. The performance of their strategic portfolio but fail to look much beyond financial and delivery time metrics. Ask yourself if particular types of projects tended to perform differently than others, or if you are grouping your portfolio correctly.
Groupings based on the organizational structure, such as lumping all projects for the marketing department together, might make organizational sense, but probably miss other critical variances. For example, most of your cloud migration efforts could be struggling, but grouping them by organizational unit obscures that fact
Try viewing your portfolio performance from different angles like organizational unit, core technologies deployed, or risk levels.