Investment and Prioritisation Framework “Doing the Right Things”
The Fragile to Agile Investment & Prioritisation Framework provides a methodical and structured mechanism for choosing which business change initiatives to fund and how much funding to allocate. As there is always more demand than can be fulfilled, investment decisions need to be made in a systematic and prudent way against a balanced decision criterion. Therefore, this process enables consistent and transparent decision making that is aligned with the strategic vision, objectives and values of the organisation.
The Framework consists of the Investment & Prioritisation Process and Organisational Decision Factors which combine to provide the decision making mechanism for governing new technology investments. The Organisational Decision Factors are derived from a variety of strategic artefacts, the specifics of which are unique to each organisation.
The Framework has the following key features:
- It is intentionally designed as an extensible framework that can be tailored to complement the existing executive decision making processes of an organisation;
- By taking an enterprise wide view of change, it provides opportunities to identify synergies and dependencies between change initiatives;
- There is a single process for all types of change. Although there may be separate pathways through the process for different types of change, to maintain the integrity of the process and achieve the desired business outcomes, there can be no backdoors or skunk works;
- It establishes stage gates that do not throttle or hinder productivity, but provide the opportunity to cancel or delay a project before a large investment is committed or consumed;
- It incorporates two key prioritisation stage gates, one for Conceptual Design prioritisation, the second for solution delivery;
- The decision factors used in making appropriately informed investment decisions are tailored for each organisation but typically include financial assessment, strategic fit analysis, heat maps and balanced scorecards (or an equivalent technique).
“IT Investment is like advertising. I know half of it is well spent. I just don’t know which half”
– Courtesy of Peter Weill, Jeanne W. Ross “IT Governance”.
– Courtesy of Peter Weill, Jeanne W. Ross “IT Governance”.