Good morning and good to see you tune in. We're excited to see more than 200 sign up for this event and I hope you are comfortable out there, have a cup of coffee and are ready to dive into today's topic. We have 30 minutes. This session is being recorded and we will share the presentation afterwards. Feel free to pass it on to anyone you think might benefit. This event today is part of a series. It's our strategy execution series and our aim is to keep you up to speed with our latest thinking. Last year we kicked off and had more than 800 sign ups across two events. First, exploring our overall strategy execution model and second, deep diving on the most requested topic, resource management. Now it's time to focus on portfolio management. Before we dive in, we'd like to warm up a little bit. Here is a prerogative statement for you to just get your thinking going. Our statement is, want to know what your strategy really is? The answer is in your portfolio. We'll get much more back to that during this session today. Today it's Alexander and I, and we are two experienced nerds in strategy execution and portfolio management. We represent a part of implement that aims to be the best on these topics. Today we will share our perspective on how to succeed. It'll mostly be us talking, but please use the chat for comments or questions. And also we have a poll coming up that you can join. Today's agenda is quite simple. We will start by zooming in on the importance of this topic. Then we will address the fundamentals of portfolio management and ask you how well you're doing on these. After we'll provide a few best practice solution elements. And we'll finalize with our five step guide on how to get going tomorrow. But let's jump into it. And I believe Alex, you have a task here to get us into the thinking. Thank you. And good morning everyone. Fantastic to have you tune in with us. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Maybe as a consequence, having this unclear link between the strategy, so what it is that we want to do strategically, and the portfolio, what is it actually we are doing, and being able to match those two together. Typically, we also see a pain around not having a clear way or standard process for prioritizing or stopping projects, meaning that when the value potential falls away on projects, they end up keep being delivered in the portfolio rather than being stopped. So there is plenty of things to work with here, and that is exactly what we are going to dive into today. So on the basis of that short recap, I think it's time that we dive more into the portfolio context. Yes. And we thought it would be good to keep this theme of a few rhetorical questions and some provocative answers. Here we are asking you to consider if you really want to be in control of your strategy, you need to prioritize your portfolio. And now we'll look into some of the fundamentals that enable us to do this. So, first of all, the element we emphasize as the first thing you need to do when looking at prioritizing is that you need to align leadership. When this is not working, when this is not working, we see confusing priorities, even political battles in the organization on what is most important. There's local suboptimal decisions, and there's no guidance for the organization to work on. However, when it works well, we see a strong leadership direction across a unified strategy and a clear structure for how to run the portfolio. The next topic is transparency. When this is not working, we don't have a clear understanding of our portfolio. There's local project lists with competing realities, shadow projects stowed away, and legacy projects from old strategies filling up the portfolio. This lack of transparency hinders good decisions because you're basically operating in the dark. When it works well, we enable a short-term strategy. We have a shared single source of truth where our portfolio data is all to be found. We have high data quality, and you can trust in the data, enabling informed portfolio positions. The third parameter is on establishing what our priorities are. We need to be able to look at what is really driving our strategic importance. When this is not working, we see no formal criteria. It's more intuition-based decisions, and the organization is unfocused, and the link to strategy, as Alexander just mentioned, becomes diffuse. Instead, we'd like clear criteria reflecting the strategic value drivers. And what we also see is that we actually can see a straight link from our strategy to our portfolio. But how do we enable that? We need clear portfolio processes. And when this is not in place, we see unstructured ad hoc decisions. There's not really a prioritization going on, and everything, as Sandra mentioned, is started and nothing is stopped. However, when it works well, we see a streamlined portfolio with decisions that maximize portfolio value creation and the strategic impact. So that's where we want to go. These are the four elements we believe are really fundamentals to succeed. And we'd like you to consider how well you are doing. So we have a mentee coming up. And here we would like you to rate your organization on these four elements. We will be back in a short while. So we're going to comment and look at it. But for now, let's see how these scores do. Welcome back. Thank you so much for taking the time to put in your numbers here. It's really interesting to take a look at. I think I can safely say that our top score is the leadership alignment. Yeah. That works better than the other ones, I guess. But yeah, you see kind of a little bit of a staircase going on here. It's spiring downwards a little bit. Yeah. But the portfolio processes is probably where organizations struggle the most. That's also where you can do some work quite easily, actually. So we're going to dive into that in a short while. Yeah, and I think also there's maybe a perspective here that we'll also dive into in a second. But these are interlinked. So if you don't have really structured portfolio processes and a strict way of working with that, it becomes really hard to get the clear priorities into effect and see that consequence. And maybe also the transparency and the leadership alignment will either follow or support. So I think it's a good but not surprising number. No, it's not. All right. Thanks for participating in this survey. And now let's get back to how do we solve these things. And there we go. We have chosen to bring a few solution elements to be from our best practice. These are the topics or the elements that we put in place whenever we start working with strategic portfolio management with our clients. And you will see some recognition from the fundamental elements we just mentioned before. And the first one about leadership alignment. What we really like to see here is a clear top-down structure and accountability in the organization. We need a collaborative leadership team with shared strategic objectives and also aligned accountability. It's essential that the communication is clear and the priorities in the organization is so as well. One of the things and the first solution element we like to share as an example here is that we work with the structure of the portfolio. Making sure that the ownership is clear and also making sure that we try to reduce complexity in the portfolio. We need to do this because no one can prioritize 50, 100 or 500 projects. So we try to anchor the decisions where the knowledge is. And therefore we try to anchor the changes. And therefore we also see at looking at how can we restructure the sub portfolios of the organization. This is one of the first steps that we usually look at. The next step around portfolio transparency is also a key challenge we try to tackle. And what we do here is to enable a solution that can gather the information. And it can range from very simplistic to very sophisticated. A full software solution suite. In implement we have our own solution. Which is a power app solution that gathers the information across the portfolio. Here we have health reporting, metadata on the projects and financials as well as the resource demand and capacity for the organization. This means that we can understand how much that's going on and also how much to take into the portfolio. This is super important so that we're not making decisions in the dark based on what we believe we could do. We also have a principle here called house in order. We need to get things straight and understand how it looks. Next thing we look at is the priorities part. And here we would like to identify the strategic value drivers. And we usually do this by looking at criteria. Portfolio criteria for the for when a project should be in our portfolio and when we might not do that one. Some of the typical criteria might be the strategic alignment, the value creation, complexity or risks. But all the organizations are unique and we usually find what are the elements that drive the strategy in this context. Also we see varying ability to do calculations on business cases and benefits. However, we always strive for the evaluating the value creation and the strategic alignment. So these are core elements to get right here so that we know that we are making the right decisions in the organization. Next is the processes. That's where you saw the low score in the poll before. So hopefully some of the elements we propose here would ring nicely with you guys. The first element we have is an annual portfolio cycle. We believe it's super important with a cadence and a rhythm in the organization for when we do prioritization. We fix this against other existing processes in the organization and usually work with roadmaps, budgeting as a yearly element but also the quarterly prioritization as a core way to put a fixed tact in the organization. We also make sure that there is a clear prioritization model. So how we actually decide the active portfolio and that we regularly look at the pipeline of ideas. We regularly look at the pipeline of ideas. So let's have some examples here. Here is the example of a yearly model. And it's from a client example we have anonymized. Here we look at again as I mentioned some of the roadmap elements feeding in to our yearly process of doing quarterly prioritization. Usually we also have monthly check -ins and adjustments of the portfolio. What is super important in our portfolio in these processes is that we are able to balance the strategic priorities against our available capacity. So ensuring that we end up with the resources allocated towards the highest priorities in our portfolio. The principles that we align here is both looking at the long term perspective but also being able to have agility in our shorter term perspective. So there should be stability to plan ahead and do our capacity planning for our functions. But we also need the agility to make the decisions on a quarterly basis on a quarterly basis so that we can adjust our course based on the input from the execution. The short and fat principle is also an element we always emphasize. Meaning that we would like projects with high allocation that can actually deliver value really fast. That is one of the key principles we also apply here. Alright. That was a look across some of our main portfolio elements. We hope that you guys have a look across some of our main portfolio elements. We hope these were food for thought and good inspiration on what is important to succeed with when you start doing strategic portfolio management. We have a little bit of a reflection question for you again here. So if you want to do this tomorrow, how do you do it? Well, of course you follow the five step guide that we also shared already before starting this event. Our five step approach here is to follow the exact elements we just went through. First of all, it's about gathering leaders. Making sure we have alignment from the top and the organization know in which direction we're moving. The second element is about creating transparency. Enabling the decisions with the right insights. Making sure we can balance the portfolio across the organization. The third element is aligning priorities. Making sure it's clear for everyone what is valuable in our organization and what we put on the top of the top of our list. The fourth element is then doing it. It's prioritizing. And it's important to emphasize that this is only possible if we have other steps in place. Otherwise the prioritization will not last and we'll probably not see the effect we hope for. Prioritization is very much about the processes. Making sure that these align across the organization and we have good mechanisms for distributing ownership and empowering the organization to make decisions at the right level. The fifth element is to circle back to sustain and continuously balance and improve our portfolio. This is where we see the incremental leaps towards even better strategic portfolio management. So summing up of some of our key principles when doing this, we want active portfolio ownership and reducing the complexity in the organization. So it's easier to make the right decisions. So it's easier to make the right decisions. We want to make sure that our house is in order. We know what's going on and we have to earn control of the portfolio. We also want to make sure that we drive the strategic value. Our priorities should be aligned across and we should all be walking towards that. The fourth element is both about the short term and the long term perspective. This is the ability for the ability for the organization to operate, but also the agility to respond to new information. And then it's the short and fat principle. Making sure that your organization is able to release value as fast as possible and have resources dedicated to the projects that they participate in. That was the summary of the elements we've been through today. And this session ended up being super efficient. Yeah. So I guess we did something right today. We maybe just have one closing remark that's really important to remember that we say on almost all of these events. And that is you cannot only tackle one of these dimensions in our framework alone. So portfolio management alone won't solve the challenges we typically experience. It's an ecosystem, meaning that you have to work with both getting a transparent portfolio, working with how to distribute your capacity in a strategic way, optimizing the way you do projects, getting learning in the way you do projects, getting learning in the way you do projects, and getting learning in the way you do projects. And then having a stable governance setup. All of these have to work together as an ecosystem if you want to get the full value out of it. So even though this is a five step guide on how to, you could say, get started on the portfolio component, please also remember to have a look at the other dimensions. We'll send out all the materials that we have used in this event and of course also related to the other dimensions. Yeah. But that's a thank you from our side. We hope this was inspirational and we hope to continue the dialogue. Please reach out and please comment even more in the chat. We will try to follow up on all that following this event. Yeah. Thanks for coming. Thank you for today. Thank you.