Financial services · South Africa
Portfolio prioritisation under pressure
Scoping Sprint · Prototype Sprint
Client overview
A diversified financial group at an inflection point: multiple digital and venture bets competing for the same executive attention and capital. Client name withheld under NDA.
Challenge
Leadership meetings cycled without durable decisions. Initiatives overlapped; success metrics conflicted; middle management carried conflicting mandates.
Approach
Scoping Sprint mapped stakeholders, decision rights and evidence gaps. Prototype Sprint tested three prioritisation frameworks with a subset of business unit heads — lightweight financial modelling and customer evidence where possible.
Outcomes
A single portfolio view with explicit kill / scale gates; agreement on three enterprise bets for the next planning cycle; and a meeting cadence that survived contact with quarter-end pressure — described by the programme lead as “the first strategy process that did not evaporate after the offsite.”
Key learnings
Prioritisation fails when metrics are not owned before politics. We invested early in naming metric owners and review dates — not only the ideas themselves.