Strategic opportunity management

As organisations survey the impact of rapid market change, most of us are focused on planning what next. For many industries, periods of great challenge also present opportunity for the brave and the agile. This article outlines some methodical steps to analyse, rank, and coordinate a structured approach to strategic opportunity management alongside an existing portfolio of work.

A strategic opportunity management methodology

The methodology outlined here is designed to help you analyse opportunities and grade them for best fit and lowest risk. You'll then learn how to systematically develop the business capabilities you'll need to be successful, and how to create an agile plan to maintain flexibility and adapt to all eventualities.

The methodology breaks down into the following stages:

1. Identify and grade new opportunities
2. Analyse strategic options
3. Analyse capability gaps
4. Analyse the impact on the current portfolio
5. Implement an agile opportunity execution plan
6. Execute and monitor progress
7. Align stakeholders

The first step is to identify new opportunities. Traditional Ansoff matrix analysis can be used to identify products and services in both existing and new markets that may now be available and easier to service than previously possible. When looking at these new markets, some useful questions include:

• What are the impacts of change in your markets or your customers' markets?
• Where are the opportunities to transform faster than would otherwise be possible?
• Where can you now improve service levels or offer new services not previously possible?
• What are the opportunities to add value to customers where there is new demand not currently being serviced well?
• What assumptions are you making about existing customers and how their needs have changed?

Once a set of opportunities have been identified, rank them based on potential benefit and cost/complexity to implement. A simple classification matrix - plotting benefit against implementation ease - can be a useful way to grade opportunities and then prioritise which you are able to support.

Once opportunities have been graded and assessed, the next focus area is what options do you have to go after them? This is the time to think outside the box and ignore old ways of servicing customers. Consider each opportunity and its different dimensions - the locations you want to offer it in, the channels you could offer it through, and different commercial models.

If agility and speed of execution are critical, consider each step required and how you could achieve it faster than previously possible. Challenge assumptions that have never been questioned before:

• Do you need your own premises?
• Do you need staff to deliver the product or service?
• Could it be provided online only and deliver the same or equivalent service?
• Could it be automated?
• Who else could you partner with or create a joint venture with?

At this point you should have new opportunities defined and the most promising ways of servicing them. The next step is to look internally at your organisation and consider which business capabilities you need in order to either go after, or service, the opportunity when won.

Business capability design is a technique used within enterprise architecture to identify capabilities that must exist for an organisation to be effective. Having considered the capabilities needed, the next question is: what level of maturity is required for each? If you're going after an enterprise client in a new market, having only the most basic level of account management capability will not be sufficient.

• Could you partner or create a joint venture with a supplier to get the capability in-house quickly?
• Could you hire new staff quickly enough, or purchase an organisation or system to ramp up capability?
• Could you grow the capability in another part of the organisation?

Analysing the impact of a new opportunity on your current portfolio is critical. It might be very tempting to put your best and brightest talent on a new exciting opportunity, but if it means existing service levels drop, you risk putting your current business in jeopardy in favour of something that may never materialise.

Consider how long the execution plans will take and whether you can afford long-term secondment. If this opportunity is so great, it might make commercial sense to stop some existing work in its favour - but make that decision consciously, with data.

Use an agile-planning method or strategy execution platform to model your implementation plans for each opportunity, the strategic contribution you expect, and the impact on the wider portfolio. We would advocate first setting out the objectives and performance measures (KPIs or OKRs) that you expect as a result of both existing plans and new plans.

By being objective and outcome focused, as the landscape changes you can quickly adapt and change execution plans in order to create strategic agility.

In complex, rapidly changing environments where the risk of failure is high, monitor your efforts regularly. Evaluate whether the opportunity still exists, what the competition are doing, and how they are responding. Any assumptions you made about the opportunity at the planning stage need to be regularly and rigorously tested.

This level of complexity and agility can be managed using traditional tools, but we strongly recommend taking advantage of the latest strategy execution platforms that can track the impact you're making and enable rapid changes in the execution plan while keeping everyone in sync.

The final and arguably most complicated step is the process of aligning teams, suppliers, and all stakeholders around the objectives, the execution portfolio, and their role in helping to achieve it. One of the biggest ways to align teams and stakeholders is to create a single view of both the short and long-term execution plan - and specifically live execution views of how everybody's contribution makes headway towards achieving the objectives.

The importance of strategy execution platforms

Today, newly emerging strategy execution products such as StrategyWorks can bring together a live, real-time execution view personalised to specific roles across the organisation. They effectively drive the analytics showing value across the portfolio and provide the agile planning of new opportunities. They allow you to model the impact of change across the portfolio and its impact on your objectives - for organisations where this kind of complexity demands analytical approaches.