A summary of the webinar: Strategic portfolio management: what organisations can learn from Silicon Valley’s VCs, 17 June 2026.

Why prioritisation remains so difficult

Many organisations have by now translated their strategy neatly into themes, roadmaps, annual plans and portfolio reviews. On paper, the direction looks clear. Yet in practice, prioritisation tends to be a recurring problem.

This rarely comes down to a lack of ideas. Nor is it because leaders are reluctant to take responsibility. The problem usually lies in the way investment decisions are made.

In a portfolio review, everyone arrives with their own perspective. Some see an urgent need for infrastructure, compliance or cost reduction. Others want to invest in customer experience, product development or new growth. Both arguments can be valid. Both can align with the strategy.

That’s where friction begins. If every initiative can be justified strategically, the question ‘does this fit the strategy?’ becomes too weak a test. Almost anything fits somewhere. The harder question is which investment creates the most value right now, given the risks, capacity and stage of the organisation.

The webinar Investing in Success brought this tension into focus. Strategic themes provide direction, but they don’t automatically create alignment. Strong portfolio teams don’t just understand their own priorities. They also understand why others want to make different choices.

This shifts portfolio management from budget allocation to shared judgement.

From project list to investment system

Strategic portfolio management is about deciding where time, money, people and attention go. That sounds straightforward, but in many organisations the portfolio is still treated as a list of projects to be assessed, ranked and funded.

That approach is too limited.

A good portfolio is not a collection of separate initiatives. It’s an investment system. It shows what value the organisation wants to realise in the short term, which options it’s keeping open for the future, and which activities should be wound down.

In a SAFe or agile context, this connects directly to Lean Portfolio Management. There, the focus isn’t only on starting new initiatives — it’s also on freeing up capacity. That last part tends to be the hardest. Legacy systems, technical debt, ongoing programmes and historical commitments continue to consume resources, even when their strategic value has declined.

Organisations that want to innovate therefore need to not only make better choices about what to start. They also need to be sharper about what to stop.

The forgotten horizon: clearing out

Many organisations use the Three Horizons model. Horizon 1 is about strengthening the existing business. Horizon 2 is about developing new opportunities. Horizon 3 is about future propositions, technologies and business models.

In IT environments, there is effectively a fourth category: Horizon Zero.

These are systems, processes and initiatives that continue to consume capacity without meaningfully contributing to strategy. Think legacy applications, old integrations, manual processes or projects that once made sense but now mainly create complexity.

In the webinar, these kinds of systems were described as ‘zombie systems’: not quite alive, but not dead either. They keep absorbing budget, attention and scarce expertise.

This is an uncomfortable reality for organisations that want to invest in AI, innovation or new digital propositions. New ambitions are often placed on top of existing complexity. The result is a paradox: everyone wants to innovate, yet a large part of capacity is tied up in maintenance and decommissioning work that is never explicitly funded.

Taking Horizon 3 seriously means being willing to tackle Horizon Zero. Renewal sometimes starts with clearing out.

What organisations can learn from VCs

Silicon Valley-style venture capital logic cannot be copied directly into corporate portfolio management. The context, governance and risk appetite are too different. But there is a useful lesson in the way VCs look at portfolios.

A venture capitalist knows that not every investment will succeed. In a portfolio, some companies will fail, some will perform modestly, and a few will deliver exceptional returns. That requires a different approach to funding. Not everything gets maximum budget upfront. Investment happens incrementally, based on progress and evidence.

For organisations, that insight is particularly relevant when it comes to innovation and Horizon 3 initiatives. There, it’s often not possible to predict the return upfront with any certainty. Yet in corporate environments, such initiatives are regularly assessed as though success needs to be proven in advance.

That has a paralysing effect. The result is that safe, predictable initiatives win out over strategically more important experiments.

VC thinking doesn’t mean organisations should invest recklessly. It means they can start smaller, formulate explicit assumptions and make further funding conditional on evidence. A limited initial investment. Then learn. Then scale, adjust or stop.

The principle is simple: fund not just ideas, but progress.

Not every investment deserves the same measure

A common mistake in portfolio reviews is assessing all initiatives against the same criteria. A cost-reduction programme, a security investment, an AI experiment and a legacy decommissioning effort all end up on the same list — and are weighed using the same business case logic.

That may seem efficient, but it makes decision-making murkier.

A Horizon 1 initiative can often be assessed on predictable value, short payback periods and operational improvement. A Horizon 3 experiment is different — there it’s about learning, creating options and reducing uncertainty. Horizon Zero calls for another lens entirely: here you’re investing in wind-down in order to free up future capacity.

Measuring these initiatives against the same yardstick tends to reward the most predictable work — not necessarily the most strategic.

A stronger portfolio process therefore starts with budget allocation per horizon. First you decide what proportion of investment capacity goes to exploitation, renewal, experimentation and decommissioning. Then you prioritise within those categories.

That way, you avoid apples, pears and structural repairs competing with one another as if they served the same purpose.

J-curves make timing visible

Investments rarely deliver immediate returns. First, costs, time and capacity go up. Value emerges later. That movement is often depicted as a J-curve: down first, then up again after an inflection point.

For portfolio management, that insight matters more than is often appreciated.

A Horizon 1 investment can show results relatively quickly. A Horizon 2 initiative typically takes longer. Horizon 3 involves more uncertainty and requires patience. Horizon Zero works differently: here you invest in decommissioning, with the goal of freeing up resources later.

If you don’t understand your J-curves, you pull the plug too quickly when disappointed, or hold on too long out of hope. Both are costly.

Portfolio teams therefore need to ask not just what something costs, but also when value is likely to emerge, for whom that value applies, and what signals indicate the investment is still on track. For commercial propositions, this applies to customers too. They’re not buying a solution — they’re investing in their own return.

That changes the nature of the conversation. It’s less about defending a budget and more about the logic of value over time.

Governance as an accelerator

Governance has a poor reputation in many organisations. It’s associated with delays, control and extra meetings. Yet that is not what good governance should do.

Good governance makes clear within what boundaries teams can operate independently. It provides clarity about decision-making authority, risks, budget limits and escalation points. Especially on topics such as AI, platform development, security and architecture, that’s not bureaucratic overhead — it’s a precondition for moving at pace responsibly.

Without governance, teams inadvertently build up risk. Too much governance brings movement to a standstill. The skill lies in designing guardrails that provide direction without centralising every decision.

Portfolio epics, ART epics or solution epics are then not administrative labels. They’re signals that an investment is large enough to warrant attention at the right level.

Governance should help deliver value faster and more safely. If it doesn’t, the process itself is part of the problem.

Participatory budgeting as a learning system

Many organisations still budget on an annual cycle. Decisions are made once a year, after which budgets are largely fixed. That creates tension with the reality of digital transformation. Markets change faster. Technology changes faster. Internal capacity changes faster.

Participatory budgeting can help reduce that tension — not as an annual workshop, but as a recurring mechanism for gathering signals from across the organisation.

The value doesn’t lie only in the outcome of the budget allocation. At least as important is what the process reveals. Sometimes it becomes clear that colleagues aren’t funding an initiative because they don’t understand it well enough. Sometimes it emerges that a broader part of the organisation sees different priorities from the executive team. Better conversations often arise when assumptions become explicit.

That turns budgeting from a spreadsheet exercise into a way of learning strategically.

For organisations that take agile working seriously, that’s essential. Agility at team level has little value if investment decisions are locked into a slow and static rhythm.

The real question

Strategic portfolio management is ultimately not about how budget is fairly distributed. It’s about what change capacity an organisation wants to build.

That requires sharper choices. Not everything can happen at once. Not every initiative deserves the same measure. Not every legacy system deserves a place in the portfolio. And not every experiment needs to prove upfront what can only be learned along the way.

Organisations that mature in this area treat their portfolio as a living system. They make more deliberate choices, invest in phases, measure progress more realistically, and stop sooner when insufficient evidence emerges.

That may be less comfortable than an annual project list. But it fits better with the reality in which organisations now operate.

The question, then, is not whether there are enough plans. There usually are. The question is whether the portfolio helps make the right future possible.

Watch the full webinar below: