Everyone knows the top priorities. Not everyone agrees on the sequence.
The strategy is signed off. The roadmap exists. And yet some of what the team is working on is hard to trace back to it, because somewhere between the strategy and the delivery queue, the choosing happens somewhere else.
Usually that’s the meeting that happened most recently. Or the request that arrived with the most urgency. Or the most senior person in the room. None of that is anyone behaving badly — it’s what happens when there’s no agreed way to choose.
What this is
We build the system that decides what gets worked on — and make sure it keeps deciding after we’ve gone.
This is not a one-off prioritisation exercise, or a scoring spreadsheet that gets used twice.
This is a working mechanism your organisation owns and operates: how work enters, how it gets ranked, who decides when two executives are competing for the same resources, and how you find out afterwards whether it was worth it.
How it works
We start by tracing what your teams are working on now, and where each piece of work came from.
Most organisations find a few things they can no longer account for. That’s normal, and it’s usually the most useful part of the exercise.
Then we design the mechanism with you: entry criteria so work doesn’t start half-specified, a regular forum where the people who can make the call are in the room and trade-offs are made in the open, and measurement so the value claimed gets checked against what actually happened.
We run it with you until it holds, then hand it over.
What you get
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A clear view of what your teams are working on, and what it’s worth
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Entry criteria to stop half-formed work consuming capacity
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A prioritisation forum with the right people in the room, where trade-offs are made in the open
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Measurement that tells you whether the decisions were right
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A capacity picture, so “we don’t have room for that” becomes a fact rather than an argument
Who this is for
Organisations where demand comfortably exceeds capacity and always will. Leaders who’ve inherited a backlog they’d like to be able to justify. Teams that are delivering plenty and getting little credit for it.
When prioritisation is unclear, the cost rarely shows up as a failed project. It shows up more quietly: capable people who can’t finish anything, teams working flat out without the credit, and investment following urgency rather than value.
Typical engagement
eight to twelve weeks, plus time running the forum with you. Design by one senior person, implementation by your team, with our support.