No matter the stage of business, there are inevitably decisions to be made with finite resources. How you evaluate one strategic opportunity over another can help determine where to spend that time - to hopefully spend it wisely. Tracking opportunities requires focus on the right ones, an approach to evaluation of one opp against another, and how the business accesses and shares this information to build alignment. Your team likely has a CRM to work funnel opportunities, but tracking of the strategic opportunities is much less standardized. This post explores a framework to both simplify and standardize the tracking of those opportunities.
Which Strategic Opportunities to focus on?
I can't tell you which opportunities are 'right' for your organization. But what I can do is share the approach I use to evaluate them, which could be applied to any organization. Here are the questions I find myself using to determine whether an opportunity makes it's way onto the opportunities board. This is the first stage of focusing your efforts; by not letting long tail/bad fit opportunities onto the board. It's not to say these are the only questions, or an opp can't make it onto the board if the answer to any of these are 'no'. But I find it's a good starting point:
- Is it good for the company?
- Is it good for the industry?
- Is it something we can deliver on?
- Is there equitable value on all sides?
- Is now the right time?
Tracking opportunities with an Opportunities Board
Most businesses have many opportunities in play. What's often-times lacking is the regular review of them and alignment with the team on how they fit into the businesses strategy (or don't). I've found an opportunities board to have the appropriate level of summary that anyone on your management team to look at that board and get a sense of where each opportunity currently lies, and how they are compared against each other.
Here's an example of one I've used in the past:
It is a tabular representation of the Effort-Impact matrix, with general enough ranking using t-shirt sizes to capture the representative evaluation. Use this as a starting point and add or remove columns as needed to cater it to your organization.
Rank order the different strategic opportunities
Utilizing the board, for starters I take an Effort-Impact matrix oriented approach to evaluation. Effort-Impact is a priority framework. It's not the only one, but I find it most applicable to this use-case:
- Low Effort, High Impact - Quick wins, aim to do these first
- Low Effort, Low Impact - Fill Ins for when there's excess capacity
- High Effort, High Impact - Major projects which could be worth it
- High Effort, Low Impact - A waste of time, avoid these
(Important to share in the assessment with other members of the team to build alignment and an accurate representation of the work to be done)
The progress on the opportunity and alignment to the organization's current strategy are useful to further refine the priorities following the Effort/Impact assessment. If you rank your opportunities, make sure to visualize them on the board for onlookers to see.
Share the opportunities board
When considering how to share the board, it's a matter of who, where and when.
Who: The contents of the strategic opportunities board could be considered privileged information depending on the organizational context, so tread lightly before sharing broadly. When in doubt, err on the side of less.
Where: Pick a medium that supports access for the intended audience. Maybe it's a direct email, maybe it's a collaborative doc or wiki page, maybe it's an occasional slide deck/meeting.
When: Also to be considered is the cadence of sharing the info. To frequently and the opportunities won't change at enough between updates. Too infrequently and folks won't know important changes to the opportunities. I find monthly is typically a good cadence for a management team meeting, board meeting, or other similar venue for folks who aren't actively working the opportunities.
Focus your time
Now that you've got a clear representation of the strategic opportunities in play, you can focus your time on the best ones. Hopefully using this approach to capturing and sharing the information will let you spend less time giving individual status updates and more time working the opportunities.
