Comparing and prioritizing initiatives

- Remember, strategic planning is about focus and prioritization, so you can properly allocate very limited resources to the highest potential initiatives that you can pursue. This is one of those steps of the process where you're going to bring everybody back together to evaluate the initiative portfolio. So the inputs to this step of the process are for everybody to have completed their scoring of their individual initiatives relative to your strategic filters. And then you're going to distribute those evaluations and discuss, because you want everybody on the team calibrated as far as what a filter means and what a high truly is, or what a low truly is. You're going to share all the initiatives and ask each initiative owner to walk the group through their scoring and to defend how they justified that particular score on that specific filter. Once you've gone through all of the initiatives on the list you need to discuss with everyone the points where things are different, where one person says this initiative is a high and somebody else has an initiative that's a high and they're not in agreement. Now an easy example is a financial filter, and perhaps one person has an initiative that's worth a million dollars and they say that's a high. Another person has an initiative that's worth $50 million, and that's a high. Well when you go through this calibration process that's where you're going to identify those points where people are not consistent. And one person will end up changing their scoring on that particular filter. And this first person would take it from a high, maybe to a medium or even a low. So expect these rankings to change as part of this discussion, and the output from this step is a consistent list of initiatives where everybody is in agreement on the scoring of them, so that you're ready to prioritize them in future steps.