Sometimes, running an enterprise feels a bit like trying to build a house during an earthquake.
One day, you’re dealing with disruptive technology and changing customer needs, next, it’s budget pressures and fears of a recession looming. Just when you think you’ve got your footing, government policy changes abruptly and forces you to rethink everything.
How do you hedge your strategic bets when the game keeps changing?
All this volatility and uncertainty mean good planning is more important than ever.
Yes, that sounds like a paradox. How does one plan when everything is constantly changing? By planning for uncertainty. Because if the target is continuously moving, you should be moving with it.
Annual planning cycles are about as useful as a parasol in a hurricane. The organizations that are thriving right now know this and have moved to continuous planning and are pairing Strategic Portfolio Management with AI to help them move faster than the speed of uncertainty.
Let’s look at organizations that don’t make the shift.
The High Cost of Immutable Planning
The last thing any enterprise wants to become is a laggard. But it happens to a lot of businesses that are stuck in their old ways.
These are the enterprises who’re locked into annual planning cycles that take months to finalize. Oftentimes, those plans are outdated before the ink dries. They’re living in the past, in an industry that no longer exists.
The consequences of rigid planning are severe.
- Your resources become trapped in work that made perfect sense months ago, but the industry has completely changed
- Entire portfolios of work no longer serve any strategic purpose, but there are no course corrections because “the plan is the plan”
- Business leaders make critical decisions based on outdated data and assumptions
Sometimes, laggards get lucky when the occasional initiative creates value, but that’s the problem – it’s luck. There’s no way to predict whether your investments will actually pay off. That’s not planning. It’s playing the lottery.
What about competitors who prioritize strategic alignment and flexible planning? They’re making forward progress by:
- Growing their market share
- Capitalizing on new opportunities
- Adapting to customers’ needs and industry demands
How your enterprise plans strategy, prioritizes initiatives, and executes work can make the difference between becoming a leader or being a laggard.
When markets shift overnight and your business needs can change at the drop of a hat, planning flexibility provided by Strategic Portfolio Management becomes your lifeline.
An effective SPM solution enhanced by AI enables you to process information, identify patterns, and make data-driven changes in real time.
You’re not only planning faster. You’re planning smarter by seeing around the corners to spot early warning signs in your data, predict resource bottlenecks before they happen, and identify other problems and opportunities that might otherwise get buried in spreadsheets or comprehensive reports.
Learn More: Create flexible planning cycles and ensure your investments, resources, and capacity are always connected to your strategic work, even when that work changes. Download our Guide to Planning Smarter with Strategic Portfolio Planning.
Turn Uncertainty into Opportunity with AI-Powered Strategic Portfolio Management
Let’s face it. There will always be times when market conditions shift. For adaptable, agile enterprises, this means priorities change and the strategic plan is revisited.
The good news is volatility and uncertainty are often chances to capitalize on new opportunities. But first, you’ve got to be able to adapt your plan in real-time, prioritizing and managing resources at speed.
Using a Strategic Portfolio Management solution with AI-powered capabilities can deliver that speed by constantly analyzing data and providing valuable insights. You can truly make the informed, big-picture decisions in real time without feeling like you’re rushing through the process.
While you’re navigating change and disruption, your SPM solution:
- Analyzes demand across portfolios and identifies which initiatives will deliver the greatest strategic value under new conditions
- Automatically revisits resource capacity as demands shift and flags resource conflicts before they turn into setbacks
- Shows how to reallocate resources for maximum impact when budgets tighten or new opportunities arise
- Identifies emerging opportunities and threats on the horizon
- Uses predictive analytics to flag issues that could develop into potential bottlenecks or opportunities
You’re better equipped to make informed decisions when it’s time to revisit the plan because things have changed due to shifting internal priorities, disruptive technology, new regulatory policies, or opportunities to gain a foothold in new markets.
Learn More: Get our Leader’s Guide to Planning Course Corrections to create organizational reflexes for identifying and executing pivot points as soon as opportunities arise.
From Planning Paralysis to Rapid Response
Change happens for many reasons. Having the systems to support flexible planning means you’re able to keep up with it.
Strategic Portfolio Management gives you the flexibility to change, while AI-driven insights facilitate rapid, intelligent decision making. Together, they ensure you’re getting the best strategic benefits when you make changes to the plan, prioritize and reprioritize work, and calculate how resources will be distributed across your portfolios.
See for yourself how the right Strategic Portfolio Management solution gives you the speed, flexibility, and data-driven decision making to find valuable opportunities where others see instability and market uncertainty. Watch this on-demand SPM demo to learn more.
