We’ve spent the past several weeks talking about the first five questions every business needs to be prepared to answer. The sixth and final question “what do you need to do right now?” implies that we need to get to work, but what do we prioritize?
In this article I recommend three frameworks for identifying initiatives worth pursuing: the purpose pyramid, the customer value map, and the cash cycle. Hopefully these three frameworks can help us identify a good list of potential work to do. But, there’s a good chance we can’t do it all, at least not right now. Raking the projects based on strategic alignment, financial impact, and specific resources required enables us to identify those that we can do with the resources available.
So by using these three frameworks, we can identify work that could be done. By prioritizing those projects, we identify the most important work to get done. And based on the resources we have, we select the work that we will do.
Tomorrow we’ll talk about actually doing that work.