Enterprise Investment Portfolio Management Level 3 Practices – Alignment

Introduction

One of the most difficult challenges in businesses is alignment, and with increased size the challenge only increases. Add to this corporate version of the telephone game the various contexts that are within modern corporations today and you are lucky to have sixty percent alignment.

A typical scenario that has been externalized is the common critique about management consultants and other associated business management business operations divides. How often does one hear “Culture eats Strategy for Lunch” or something similar. Or from the alternative perspective “If I ask my customer what he wants, he’ll just say a faster horse” thus demonstrating that operations misses the point that businesses and the market have never been static; and competitiveness continues to have a shorter and shorter shelf life.

At the core of this dilemma is that at each level of a corporation the context, responsibility, accountabilities, and concerns are different. And typically do not have a mapping between such. What I theorized is that an Integrated Enterprise Portfolio can mitigate some of this issue.

Such a portfolio not only captures the concerns of each level but provides that mapping so vital to creating alignment between the layers of an organization. This section of Enterprise Investment Portfolio Management: Level 3 Practices –Alignment proposes to define a mapping between the various visualization tools in popular usage such as Business Model Canvas, Benefits Dependency Network, Strategic Capabilities Network, SAFE™ etc.

 

Business Model Canvas and Agile-like taxonomy

Business Model Canvas and Lean Canvas over the past few years have become many management consultants and executive’s most favored tools. In a one page visual someone can see how a business creates value for both stockholder and customer. Unfortunately, once we leave the world of executive management and strategy we lose both context and concern.

While it is unlikely we can transmit context, the concern can be projected or mapped into another context that lower levels of operational employees can align to.

Above is initial draft of this mapping. The Agile-Fall taxonomy in the organizations I’m working with may have other labels but still follow the same hierarchy as well as are still in the evolutionary state.