Strategic Alignment

Having a strategy is not enough.

Strategic priorities only become useful when they are concrete enough to guide choices about existing and proposed work. Otherwise, almost everything can be described as “aligned”.

Strategic alignment is about connecting strategic direction to the decisions and activities that follow from it. In this guide, we’ll look at how to make priorities explicit, assess how alternatives contribute to them, and use that evidence when deciding what should receive attention and resources.

We’re going to dig deep into strategic alignment, but feel free to jump to any section that interests you:

1. Understanding Strategic Alignment
2. How to Achieve Strategic Alignment
3. How to deliver Strategic Alignment
4. Getting Started: First Steps for Strategic Alignment

Understanding Strategic Alignment

1. What is Strategic Alignment
2. The Importance of Strategic Alignment
3. The Benefits of Strategic Alignment of Projects
4. Infograph: 3 Reasons to Align Projects with Strategy

What is Strategic Alignment

In the modern business landscape, companies are constantly challenged with evolving customer demands, technological advancements, and competitive pressures. Organizations therefore need to connect their goals, initiatives, resources, and operations to their overarching strategy. This connection is what we mean by 'Strategic Alignment.'

Strategic alignment entails aligning the daily activities, projects, and objectives of an organization with its mission, vision, and strategy. It bridges the gap between strategy formulation and execution by ensuring that all elements of the organization are working towards a common set of objectives. In this article, we will delve into what strategic alignment really is, and explore how it can be integrated into the planning process to build a high-impact strategy.

Cultural Alignment for Sustained Success

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

Put bluntly, none of this matters if the attitude of the people is at odds with the strategy. You cannot have an innovation strategy and a fear-of-failure culture, just as you cannot have strategy geared to customer service if you treat you front-line like a cost center. In this context strategic alignment means recognizing the reality of how people feel is as important as any process.

If you think this is just fluffy nice-to-have window dressing, why not take a look at Microsoft’s share price, then watch Satya Nadella talk about purpose culture and growth mindset. Also have a look at Carol Dweck’s book on Mindset. The key is that strategic alignment is built on leadership and culture.

As we explore this topic, we'll treat strategic alignment as a verb; a doing word with recommended steps to execute. If you ‘achieve’ strategic alignment, it can become a noun – a thing that gives your organization an edge, and it is this cultural dimension that makes it virtually impossible to copy.

Just consider Toyota. Their manufacturing processes have been admired by business schools for decades (I recall studying them ‘back in the day’) but their market cap remains market leading. The reason? The depth of the strategic alignment inherent in their unwavering commitment to continuous improvement (Organizational Identity, Corporate Strategy, and Habits of Attention: A Case Study of Toyota).

This alignment not only reinforces their operational efficiency but also gives them a strategic advantage, as it is deeply ingrained in their culture. You can copy the benchmarking, the focus on efficiency, the relentless improvements of ‘Kaizen’, the Just In Time supply chain…. but not the strategic alignment that holds it all together.

The Importance of Strategic Alignment

Research has repeatedly highlighted the difficulty of turning strategy into what an organization actually does:

• An Economist Intelligence Unit survey sponsored by PMI of 587 senior executives found that 61% said their organizations often struggled to bridge the gap between strategy formulation and day-to-day implementation.
• Research published in Harvard Business Review found that only 55% of the middle managers surveyed could name even one of their company's top five priorities.

These are historical findings from different populations, not universal performance benchmarks. But they expose the practical problem strategic alignment is trying to solve: strategy has to become clear enough to guide the decisions and work that follow from it.

That is not only a PMO problem. Leadership, strategy, finance, transformation, technology and portfolio teams can all face the same question: how do we turn strategic priorities into a useful basis for deciding what deserves support?

The benefits of doing that are multi-dimensional. Let’s look at them next.

If you’d like a longer discussion of the topic, you can also watch our Strategic Alignment Matters webinar recorded for the PMO Trends Online Conference.

The Benefits of Strategic Alignment of Projects

This might sound like a lot effort… but it’s tiny compared to the benefits to be gained.

• Project outcomes: In this post we look at the relationship between strategic alignment and project outcomes. Alignment does not guarantee that a project will succeed, but making the intended strategic contribution explicit gives leaders a stronger basis for deciding whether the work still deserves support.
• Focus on strategic contribution: Making strategic contribution explicit helps distinguish work that strongly supports current priorities from work whose contribution is weaker or has changed. That can prompt a review of existing commitments as well as new proposals. See why stopping existing work can still be difficult.
• Stronger executive sponsorship: The lack of executive sponsorship is a regular complaint when it comes to delivering projects. One useful test is whether the project has a clear connection to the priorities leadership has agreed. Linking projects explicitly to strategic goals gives sponsors a clearer basis for discussing why the work matters and what it is expected to contribute.
• Eliminate waste: Projects can stay active because they once mattered, or because a sponsor still protects them. Pet projects are one example. Reviewing strategic contribution can reveal commitments worth changing or stopping, but that still requires a decision about the work and resources that would replace them. See why stopping work can be harder than identifying it.
• Strengthen decision support: Making strategic contribution explicit gives PMOs, portfolio teams and other decision-support functions a clearer way to connect the work they oversee to the priorities leadership has agreed.
• Clearer resource allocation decisions: Making strategic contribution explicit gives leaders better evidence about which initiatives support agreed priorities more strongly. That informs resource allocation, but does not determine it: funding, capacity, mandatory work, dependencies and other constraints still shape which combinations of work are feasible.
• Stronger  benefits realization: How can you realize benefits that you don’t understand? Going through the process of aligning your projects with strategy means that you have to be clear about what you’re trying to achieve and that, naturally, helps you achieve it. As that great sage, Yogi Berra, said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up someplace else!”
• Project team motivation: And if you know where you’re going, you can use this in your kick-off planning to work out what you need to do to deliver the results. Instead of being focused on delivering a rather dry list of features, brief your team on what you’re trying to achieve, work backwards from there to “what needs to get done” and to “what key milestones and decisions are needed” and watch your project team really soar!

Infograph: 3 Reasons to Align Projects with Strategy

How to Achieve Strategic Alignment

1. Strategic Alignment: The DNA of a Successful Planning Process
2. Strategic Alignment Healthcheck: Knowing Your Start Point
3. Operational Blueprint: How to Get a Brilliant Strategic Alignment Plan
4. Embarking on the Journey: Next Steps for Successful Strategic Alignment

Convinced your organization could benefit from strategic alignment, but not sure where to start? There’s A LOT of material out there, but let’s start with the basics.

Strategic Alignment: The DNA of a Successful Planning Process

Strategic Alignment starts as a verb – a doing word. It’s not a distinct step in a process, but rather a way of working that flows throughout an effective strategic planning process.

Strategic alignment matters throughout planning and execution, not at one isolated step. Building on our Strategic Planning guide, let’s explore seven areas where alignment needs attention.

• Vision & Mission: Defining the direction of an organization is a leadership task, not a devolved activity. There needs to be a shared sense of purpose that bonds people together, not a series of disconnected perspectives from different teams.

  However, listening is critical. Find the stories and relatable human perspective that can help shape the identity of the organization. Don’t brainstorm a strategy in isolation.

• Strategic Analysis: Data gathering is another exercise in active listening. Ask your analysts what they see, don’t just dictate the data you want them to show you. Likewise, the voice of the customer. The biggest pitfall here is an aversion to anything negative. If you find yourself censoring and manipulating ‘the story’ to look better than it is, your strategy will not be aligned, as it won’t reflect the reality in which it has to be executed. It simply serves to re-enforce the gap between leadership and the front-line.

  Been there, seen it, fudged it.

• Goal Setting: For a strategy to work it must be actionable. That means broad ambitious missions need to be structured into clear measurable strategic goals. There needs to be clarity over the way these goals cascade through the organization, both in terms of divisional accountability and portfolio structure for cross-team projects.

  It's critical this alignment happens with a clear-minded approach that recognizes a couple of massive elephant traps. Status Quo bias looks for evidence that change should be minimized (it can also mean a fondness for double-denim, but that’s for another blog), while personal ambition is often prevalent in how individuals play the game when it comes to growing their influence within an organization.

  This is also the start point for prioritization. An exhaustive list of goals that bears no relation to your resource constraints is setting your strategy up to fail. Identify must-haves vs. nice to haves and then be prepared to challenge individuals who may find this realignment deeply uncomfortable.

• Strategy Formulation: Every strategy needs projects. These can be ‘business as usual’ initiatives to deliver improvements within a division, or big hairy goals that aim to drive transformation. Most successfully aligned strategies contain both.

  Alignment in this context means linking ideation to goals. In other words, having said what matters most, go find the solutions that deliver against these objectives. That also means involving people closer to delivery, who can bring operational knowledge into the choices being made. This helps address the gap between strategy and execution.

  Alignment means connecting that delivery knowledge to what the organization most needs to achieve.

• Action Planning: Effective strategy means making choices. This can include ‘positive’ decisions like where to invest more and picking innovations to pursue, or ‘negative’ decisions like which divisions to divest or where to stop projects that are not working. No organization can do everything brilliantly all at once. McKinsey research on corporate resource allocation illustrates the importance of moving resources as priorities change rather than leaving them attached indefinitely to yesterday’s choices.

  So, again prioritization is critical. An aligned action plan means recognizing the limits of what can be achieved and shaping the backlog around the most critical deliverables. Resources are finite, so focus is key to identifying the results which will give the strategy most momentum.

  At this stage, the strategy should be morphing into accountability. Decide how the work fits into the organization. How are budgets allocated? Do you need to stand up cross-team projects? What are the objectives your divisional leads need to reward aligned behavior? For a large organization this is a far from trivial process.

• Strategic Execution: There are two important ways in which alignment must flow through execution.

  The first is to involve the delivery teams. People are more than units of resource, and involving them in the ideation and evaluation of alternatives can bring delivery knowledge into the decision and help people understand the reasoning behind it.

  The second is to consider the major ‘one-way’ decisions within your priority projects. These are the big bets you can’t get to through iterative experimentation. Think picking an airport location or selecting a vendor for a critical contract. Alignment in this context means asking the question – which choice will better support the strategy, rather than having procurement focusing purely on which one can we get cheaper?

• Evaluation and Review: A well-built strategy includes a definition of value for all key activities, so its logical that the same measurement is used to judge project success. But it frequently does not.

  First consider project delivery tracking. Funds are committed in expectation of getting value, yet all-too-often projects are measured based on on-time / on-budget tracking. Then consider executive remuneration. How many bonus schemes focus on value, versus ‘hard’ short-term financial KPIs?

  The common theme here is that value is often harder to assess than cost or delivery progress. One structured way to compare different dimensions of value is the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), which we’ll talk about below.

Strategic Alignment HealthCheck: Knowing Your Start Point

“If I wanted to get there, I wouldn’t start from here.”

This is a punchline to a very old joke but seems as true today as ever. For all the wonderful models about alignment, the biggest challenge is to reconcile the neat theory to the messy reality that is your organization.

Firstly, it’s worth recognizing that no two organizations are the same, so anyone selling a miracle solution is probably being a little over-optimistic.

Secondly, let’s keep this simple, and focus on three questions:

• What strategy (are we aligning to). It sounds blindingly obvious, but you’d be surprised how many teams are operating on their own slightly wrong understanding of the strategy. Or maybe an IT team are trying to use the corporate strategy and ignoring the divisional plans elsewhere. And of course, there are folks how have no explicit strategy so they kind of make one up based on stuff execs seem to care about.

  The point is simple – have an unambiguous strategy documented as your north star, and make sure someone senior signs it off. Aligning to a moving target is like playing pin the tail on the donkey with the blindfold on (you, not the donkey...)

• Find the burning platform. We’ve said this a few times now; don’t try and do everything right away. Pick the project, portfolio or division where strategic alignment is most needed. Apply focus to create momentum, to build engagement. Fitting it all together can follow.
• Align with or challenge the process? A key choice in terms of execution will be to fit into a process or to attempt a full ‘rip and replace’. Clearly the former is easier if the process is flexible enough to change. What you don’t want to do is fudge this by adding in a new process and keeping the old one, as nothing annoys people more than task duplication (apart from roadworks obviously).

Operational Blueprint: How to Get a Brilliant Strategic Alignment Plan

This rather depends on where you sit within an organization, but there are some key themes which you should reflect upon whether you’re the CEO, the PMO or a Divisional Leader. We could come up with loads of these, but here are our top tips:

• Get a plan: Strategic alignment could be applied to so much that there is a risk that you create ‘opportunity paralysis’ where your program of change simply becomes too complex to get started. Pick a win, land it. Repeat. Momentum is key.
• Champion sponsor involvement: Having an effective sponsor is a key indicator for project success. When building the investment case, it means having a senior stakeholder who’ll be accountable for the benefits, and the alignment it is projected to deliver. During delivery they also need to track that value remains on plan so there are no nasty surprises later.
• Treat resources strategically: Alignment means putting your money where your mouth is. Or rather putting your resources where your priorities are. Talking a big game then leaving finance to allocate an extra 2% budget to everyone will not deliver alignment. Embracing agile budgeting practices can provide the flexibility to reallocate funds and ensure that financial resources are aligned with strategic initiatives in a dynamic and responsive manner.
• Allow time: Alignment takes effort; to structure the strategy, systematically work through prioritization, to involve people…. This is why leadership commitment is critical. After all picking projects based on seniority or just saying yes to everything is much faster (although wastes a lot more time). If you do need to go fast read our 8 week deployment guide here.
• Invest in doing it right: Unless your organization is small, this process is going to be complex. So, you’ll need more than a spreadsheet and a can-do attitude. This support can be consultancy, tooling… or both, but don’t expect (effective) transformation to happen for ‘free’. Excel is the wrong tool for this job.
• Build a growth mindset: Getting everyone to focus on delivering ‘the strategy’ ultimately means changing how we do things round here. People have to be responsive to change and willing to collaborate. Being ready to reconsider existing commitments is also important; if a project no longer supports current priorities, bring it back for review rather than assuming the original decision must stand.
• Align more than resources: We talk a lot about strategic planning, and processes, but at its best strategic alignment should permeate into all decisions, not just resource allocation. Deciding on HR policy? Which option aligns best to strategy. Designing a new product? Which option aligns best to strategy… we could go on (but won’t).

There are many possibilities, but the key is to prioritize. You can’t align everything straight away, but every day spent being too busy to resolve this is time your competition may be using to progress their alignment.

Embarking on the Journey: Next steps for Successful Strategic Alignment

Delivering strategic alignment is not like putting in a new accounting system, with nicely curated magic quadrant of tools waiting for your cash, and a clear set of deployment tasks. It’s much more like a journey up a (large) mountain which can be approached from a number of different directions. Here are the ones we like best:

• Strategic planning challenge: If the strategy itself needs to be rebuilt, that may call for strategic planning or consulting support before you try to align work to it. Your leadership team may already have trusted advisors for that work.
• Governance challenge: Strategic alignment can be approached via a governance lens, with a series of tools available to address the component parts of the challenge. Our partners at Deepteam offer excellent support in this process, and you can watch our webinar with them here.
• PMO best practice challenge: Perhaps you’re a PMO leader ready to take on this challenge yourself? Laura Barnard and PMO Strategies offer the IMPACT Engine programme and support for PMO and strategy-delivery leaders.
• Decision Science challenge: TransparentChoice applies the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) in software to help structure strategic priorities and assess how alternatives contribute to them. We’ll talk more about this next.

How to deliver Strategic Alignment

1. Overview of AHP-led Strategic Alignment
2. Engage the leadership team
3. Define the Strategic Goals
4. Weight the Strategic Goals
5. Measure Strategic Alignment
6. Use Alignment Evidence in Resource Decisions

Overview of AHP-led Strategic Alignment

Let's start with the basics: there are five steps to delivering strategic alignment with AHP:

• Engage the Leadership Team to be clear about what it is you're aligning to
• Define Strategic Goals which connect your prioritization process to your strategy
• Weight Strategic Goals with a Pairwise review, and do this as a team sport for the C-Suite
• Measure the Strategic Alignment, of potential projects using subject matter experts
• Use Alignment Evidence in Resource Decisions, alongside funding, capacity and other constraints

We've prepared this short video to introduce how it all works, and we'll then dive into the detail below.

Engaging the Leadership Team

Firstly we need to make sure the leadership team is on board with using the Analytic Hierarchy Process. This isn't something that a crazy British vendor just make it up – it’s been developed over 50 years of academic and real-world use. Check out this research into decision making (specifically into multi-criteria decision making which is what we’re dealing with here) to learn more.

It's key that that they commit, as you'll need their time, influence and budget to make this happen.

Download this pack if you need ammunition for this battle.

Defining Strategic Goals

Defining strategic goals involves pinpointing the broad, measurable objectives of your organization, and distinguishing them from specific projects or outdated KPIs. Analyze your strategy plan or major ongoing projects to identify overarching goals that are linked to tangible actions.

For instance, a high-level goal like 'Reduce Environmental Impact' can be broken down into measurable sub-goals like 'reducing energy consumption' or 'switching to renewable power sources'. It's essential to communicate with key stakeholders to ensure that the drafted goals resonate with them and to attain collective agreement.

Weighting Strategic Goals

After identifying strategic goals, it's necessary to establish their relative importance by assigning weights. Since not all goals have equal significance and stakeholders might have varied perspectives, it’s critical to achieve alignment.

This can be done through a pairwise review process, wherein stakeholders assess the relative importance of two goals at a time. This approach is effective because humans excel at making relative judgments and it facilitates more specific discussions, leveraging the collective expertise. This structured approach to defining and weighting goals will provide a robust foundation for organizational alignment.

More: Strategic Goals – the Key to Strategic Execution

Measuring Strategic Alignment

The first thing we need to do is figure out what we are going to measure. Thinking back to our Strategic Planning process this means Strategy Formulation. Coming up with things to do. These can be programs, initiatives, projects or even business as usual activities. We’ll call them alternatives for now.

The point is that you have a list of alternatives and enough information to assess how each contributes to the strategy. Weak strategic contribution can be a reason to question existing or proposed work, but it is one input to the decision rather than an automatic stop signal.

Measuring strategic alignment is not simply a check box task. Asking a simple yes/no question, “Does X align with strategy?” is one of the most common mistakes people make when trying to achieve strategic alignment. Why? Well, because everyone will say “yes”.

Really what we’re interested in is the contribution X makes to your various strategic goals. Only then will you be able to work out which alternatives are best aligned to those strategic goals.

Another common mistake people make when measuring strategic alignment is to assume that the executive team should do the measurement. For example, when selecting projects for the coming year, many organizations will wheel those projects out in front of the senior management and let the leadership team make their own determination of strategic alignment.

Really?

The VP of sales can make a good determination of how a particular project will affect customer care? Your CFO is a good judge of how much more revenue will be generated from a particular initiative? Of course not!

So how do we, in practice, measure alignment?

The answer is to leverage a solid weighted scoring system based on AHP. We’re already weighted the criteria with pairwise. Now we need to score our alternatives.

In this step, you create scales for each of your strategic goals. These scales should measure the contribution to the goal you’re interested in. For example, if entering the European market is one of your strategic goals, your scale might look like this:

What difference will this project make to our ability to enter the European market?

• 0 - No impact on European market entry
• 1 - Small impact of European market entry
• 2 - Moderate positive impact that would make a small, but definite difference
• 3 - A real difference to either the speed, size or risk of market entry
• 4 - A significant difference to either the speed, size or risk of market entry
• 5 - A game changer or “must have” for market entry in Europe

Now, it’s really hard to write a good scale “in theory” so this scale probably has flaws, but you get the idea - you’re looking to capture what the impact is on the business goal.

So now we have a beautiful scale that perfectly captures the contribution to our goals… but who should answer the question?

This depends on what you’re evaluating. Generally, the answer should be “people who are experts and who do not have a preference for one outcome or another”.

Think about project selection. If the person requesting the project is asked to score their idea against different goals, they will try to “game” the system by scoring everything higher than it should be. [A quick aside: making our scale about “contribution to a goal” has made it much harder to game the system than simply asking, “Does it contribute..” so we’re already ahead of where we were!]

This is why it can be useful to involve people with relevant subject-matter expertise in the scoring. Where possible, separating the assessment from the person proposing the work, or having another expert review it, gives you another perspective on the evidence behind the score.

Different people can make materially different judgements when answering the same question. We explore this problem in more detail in Noise in Decision-Making.

For important assessments, collecting more than one perspective can make those differences visible. Reviewing where people disagree gives the group a useful basis for discussing assumptions, evidence and interpretation before settling on an assessment.

Use Alignment Evidence in Resource Decisions

Now you’ve scored your alternatives, simply multiply the score and the weight for each goal to calculate a score for each alternative. The result is a 0-100 score for each alternative allowing you to see which ones are most aligned to strategy.

Those scores help explain how each alternative contributes to the agreed goals, but they are not yet a portfolio decision. Funding, delivery capacity, mandatory work and dependencies affect which combinations are feasible. Action planning therefore needs to compare workable combinations, including what each would protect, defer or stop. Leadership can choose which portfolio to support and then apply a less is more approach to delivery.

There is also a process benefit here. Involving leadership in defining priorities and subject-matter experts in assessing contribution makes the reasoning behind the scores more visible to the people involved. That does not guarantee agreement, but it gives people a clearer basis for discussing differences. This is one reason collaborative prioritization can require more than a spreadsheet completed in isolation.

Getting Started: First Steps for Strategic Alignment

1. When Should I Start Strategic Alignment?
2. Don’t Re-invent the Wheel
3. Top Tips for the Journey
4. Product Demo

When Should I Start Strategic Alignment?

Throughout this guide we’ve focused on driving strategic alignment in the context of a strategic planning process. But what if you have an existing portfolio and a strategy your CEO isn’t about to change anytime soon?

Do you wait? No, of course not. Given what’s at stake, the right time to drive strategic alignment is… now, and you can use it on your existing portfolio as well as new projects,

Consider this Strategic Fit Matrix – would you expect to find any zombies creeping around in your portfolio? It could be they started as legitimate priorities, but the benefits case has slipped over time to the point where it's simply not worth doing.

Or perhaps you're working on too many projects, so your heavy lifting deliverables are taking an age to get out of the door. Can you pause some minor victories to land a bigger win?

Either way the message is the same: use strategic contribution as a lens for reviewing the live portfolio, not just new proposals. And don't forget that WHEN things get done matters. Timing, sequencing and the remaining value of existing commitments can all affect whether the current portfolio still makes sense.

Put another way don't be the busy fool; focus on what stakeholders really want.

There’s another huge win doing this on a live portfolio. By creating a database of scored projects you’re also starting to learn. Calling out wasteful projects is uncomfortable, but by doing so you’re far less likely to commit to more,

If you’re skeptical about this opportunity, check out one of our favourite TED Talks, where Matthew Syed introduces the concept of Black Box Thinking. The useful idea here is to learn systematically from decisions and outcomes rather than treating each portfolio review as an isolated event. The same principle can be applied when revisiting work whose expected value or strategic contribution has changed.

Don’t Re-invent the Wheel

We’ve supported organizations using structured prioritization and strategic alignment in a range of different settings. Here are a few examples of what that has looked like in practice.

One major Canadian mutual’s CEO told us, “We’re having conversations we should have had years ago”. As they used the software to identify their strategic priorities, and found the first big win was to align the leadership group, getting people to have a productive debate about the relative weight of competing goals.

At Harbor Foods, business leaders became more directly involved in prioritization and setting the criteria used to assess work. As PMO leader Anette Smith put it, “The PMO is working for the business with the business.”

At the American Planning Association, the board helped define and weight strategic criteria and executives assessed initiatives against them. The process made pet projects more visible and, in the customer’s words, “changed the way our board is thinking about prioritization.”

Top Tips for the Journey

Every Brit knows that a successful journey starts with a thermos of tea, and a decent supply of biscuits (that's cookies, if you're reading this anywhere else in the world). We definitely recommend both for your strategic alignment journey, but would add another couple of suggestions on top:

• Define scope: Strategy can be a large corporate ambition, or a ring-fenced divisional plan. It doesn’t matter, the key is to be clear about what you’re doing and then do it. Likewise decide what and who you are aligning. Projects? Business As Usual? Everything?

• Get your toolkit: Don’t assume that you’ll be able to do everything in Excel. We've built a solution to make AHP work for modern organizations, like yours. See our Demo below, and decide if we can help.
• Build a plan: Landing prioritization is basically a project. It needs a timeline, resources, business case and a sponsor. Especially the sponsor.
• Get you Brave Pants ready: Strategic alignment is a big gnarly change management process. They’ll be resistance and hard work before the high fives start flowing, so be ready to show resilience to make it all happen.

Product Demo: See how to use TransparentChoice to drive alignment

The webinar shows how strategic priorities can be made explicit and then used to assess the contribution of different projects and initiatives:

• Make priorities explicit: define strategic goals and establish their relative importance.
• Assess contribution: compare how different projects or initiatives contribute to those goals.
• Revisit the decision: strategic priorities and assessments can be revisited when circumstances change.
• See it in practice: the RNLI case study shows how priorities were reweighted and the portfolio reconsidered when conditions changed.

The webinar also includes a demonstration of TransparentChoice software for structuring these judgements and making the resulting priorities and assessments explicit. Those alignment assessments inform portfolio decisions, but funding, capacity, mandatory work, dependencies and other constraints still determine which combinations of work are feasible.