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RedYabber IT Strategy Roadmap (Part 3/4)
RedYabber IT Strategy Roadmap (Part 3/4)

Creating and prioritising Initiatives

Chuen Seet avatar
Written by Chuen Seet
Updated over a week ago

In Part 2, Jenny defined her IT function's capability map, assessed it for change and defined actions where required.

In this part, Jenny will formulate initiatives, which are collections of actions into logical packages of work.  It is likely that an approved initiative is delivered as a project or program.  Jenny will also assess her list of initiatives to ensure that the organization will focus on the high value and lower risk/effort initiatives first.

Formulating initiatives

In the Initiatives step, Jenny starts by scrolling down (on the left panel) to review her list of capabilities with the corresponding actions.  She spots the Digital Marketing capability and decides to start here by selecting the Add (+) function to create an initiative and naming it "Digital Marketing Platform Established".  

To form the Digital Marketing Platform Established initiative, Jenny drags/drops "Define Digital Marketing Strategy", "Establish Digital Marketing Technology Platform" and "Stand-up Digital Marketing Team" actions to the initiative. 

Jenny can see that once an action is assigned to an initiative, then it is disabled from the list in the left panel and the color is changed to grey.  This is helpful for Jenny as she can easily see which actions are still to be assigned to an initiative.

Jenny continues to formulate her initiatives until she arrives at the following initiative map. 

Prioritizing initiatives

Having formulated her list of initiatives, Jenny proceeds to the Prioritize Initiative function in the Initiative step.  In this function, Jenny will place her initiatives on a 2 x 2 grid which will help her assess each initiative relative to each other from a value against risk/effort perspective.  

Jenny will select and drag/drop each initiative onto the 2 x 2 assessment grid and place them based on an approximation of value against risk/effort.  As she places each initiative onto the 2 x 2, she will assess each initiative's value and risk/effort relative to each other.  For example, is the value of Digital Marketing Platform Established greater than Digital Marketing Campaign?  The emphasis here is to perform a relative comparison between each initiative.  Hence, actual value or actual risk measure is not required.

Jenny placed all her initiatives onto the 2 x 2 and assessed them as illustrated below.

After further discussion with her peers, Jenny adjusted the target zone on the 2 x 2 (the lasso that is used to select the most important initiatives) as shown above. In this case, Innovation Management, which although could deliver high value, was assessed to pose significant risk to the organization.  A decision was made that for now, this initiative should be deferred until RedYabber had an established a digital platform and digital capabilities.

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