Portfolio Prioritisation
Choosing between investments with incomparable benefits.
4 to work through
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beginner
A quarterly plan allocates 100% of engineering capacity to roadmap features. The rationale is that maintenance work can be picked up as it arises. Review the plan.
2 min answer -
intermediate
An architecture team has more improvement proposals than capacity. How should they be prioritised?
2 min answer -
intermediate
An organisation has forty proposed initiatives and capacity for eight. What framework produces a defensible portfolio, and what does it need to avoid?
2 min answer -
intermediate Multiple choice
Three funded initiatives each need about six weeks of work from the same two-person identity team, which also absorbs roughly 30% of its time in unplanned support. All three sponsors want to start now and the plan shows all three starting now. Which rule should decide the sequence?
3 min answer
4 terms in this topic
Cost of Delay
The economic loss per unit of time that a decision or delivery is postponed, which turns prioritisation from opinion into arithmetic.
practiceKeeping-the-Lights-On Baseline
The share of engineering capacity that unplanned and maintenance work consumes whether or not it is planned, reserved explicitly so that roadmap comm…
practiceProtected Allocation
A fixed share of capacity reserved for a category of work that loses every individual comparison against features - because the aggregate outcome wou…
practiceWeighted Shortest Job First
Sequencing work by dividing the cost of delaying it by the effort to deliver it, which maximises value delivered per unit of time.
Neighbouring topics
Business Architecture
General material on the business side of architecture.
Business Capabilities
What a business does, stated stably and independent of implementation.
Capability Mapping
Overlaying systems onto capabilities to expose duplication and gaps.
Business Processes
How work actually flows, including the handoffs nobody documented.
Value Streams
End-to-end delivery of an outcome, and where the waiting happens.
Domain Boundaries
Where the language of the business changes, and services should too.
Stakeholder Analysis
Who is affected, what they need, and who can block you late.
Product Thinking
Treating platforms and services as products with users and a lifecycle.
Business KPIs
The numbers a design is ultimately judged against.
Regulatory Constraints
Non-negotiable requirements that remove design options entirely.
Organisational Constraints
Team structure, skills and budget cycles as architectural inputs.
Time to Market
The constraint that dominates most products, and how to trade against it.
Build vs Buy
Differentiation versus table stakes, priced over five years.
Business Cases
Expressing an architecture proposal in the currency that gets funded.
Operating Models
How delivery, platform and governance functions fit together.
Team Topologies
Stream-aligned, platform, enabling and complicated-subsystem teams.
Platform as a Product
Adoption earned rather than mandated, with an owner and a roadmap.
Outcome Measurement
Knowing whether the thing you built achieved what it promised.
Business Continuity
What the business does while the system is unavailable.