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Christopher Global

Industry Insight

 

Unparalleled industry insights that keep you well informed. 

How to prioritize initiatives based on business value and strategic alignment

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When it comes to business value and strategic alignment, you usually go for one of two things. Firstly, they'd be tools to weigh each initiative as part of the portfolio, and secondly, a roadmap of the leader's goals that year. Today, either of those would be common practice, but do they really work? Let's dig a little deeper into this. 


Just like the title of the email suggests, priority isn't about tools or following commands, it's about a strategic approach to business value. Refer back to your strategic goals. Was it easy to turn those goals into actionable initiatives that drove value? It's a good first step to drive clarity to the creation of a goal, and to decompose it into its business value. 


What's the forecasted revenue, customer benefit, and risks? Before you can use weight scoring tools, you have to drive value and engagement through cross-functional stakeholders. In the end, no team is able to deliver end-to-end services on its own. 


Is your business value (soon to be business roadmap) balanced between short-term and long-term gains? One of the biggest mistakes people make when driving business value is underestimating the effort of complex initiatives that often end up being continuous investments with delayed returns. It's also possible to make short quick investments but miss your revenue targets. 


True business value may elude you due to the fact that, particularly in startups, there is a focus on acquiring new customers while delaying enhanced opportunities for existing customers. We rarely see strategic initiatives to contact existing customers and sell them the latest services planted on roadmaps, even though your current customers are also interested in what you have to offer. 


There's probably too much reliance on account management, rather than making this a strategic and actionable objective. Revenue strategy comes from new and existing customers, just like product strategy derives from new and existing products. Prioritization should balance what we have vs what we want.  

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