Utilizing Budget in the Right Project: Prioritizing Initiatives

Nawaf is a Portfolio Manager in Bahrain.

  Scope Management   Strategy  

Utilizing your budget in the right project/initiative is vital. The challenge, however, is how to select the most appropriate initiatives for which to seek funding.

There are many ideas generated during the process of creating and updating the suite of balanced scorecards in a strategically focused organization. Due to competing demands on scarce financial resources, not all proposed initiatives can be funded. So how do we prioritize initiatives within the organization, in particular the public sector?

First, a brief description: Initiatives are the balanced scorecard term for opportunities that can advance the achievement of one or more strategic objectives. Initiatives are found by looking at strategic measures (that support objectives) and asking: How do we bridge the gap between where the organization is presently and where the target (which supports the measure and typically represent a performance) says the organization would like to be at some future point in time?

In essence, each strategic initiative can be described as a change program of a number of projects or business improvement opportunities.

Strategic initiatives are prioritized/re-prioritized on a biannual basis, in keeping with the government budgeting cycle (although it should be stressed that not all initiatives require additional funding--many can be executed through relatively simple process/…

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