What are Portfolio Landscape Assessments?
- Scientrix Grids can be used to display various “strategic portfolio landscapes” for an organization such as Clients, Products & Services, Capabilities, Outlets, Partners, Programs or Projects, Talent, etc.
- In these portfolio landscapes, each element represents a client, a product, a capability, an outlet, etc.
- These elements can then be enriched with relevant data to provide a high-level overview of the portfolio landscape. Unfortunately, hard data is not always easily available.
- Fortunately, organizations typically have people who are familiar with the specific portfolio and who can provide a quick expert assessment for an element.
- Enabling these assessments and visualizing the resulting patterns allows for faster insights into what is going on in the portfolio-landscape and is a critical input for defining a strategy over this portfolio.
There are 4 steps to working with portfolio-landscape assessments:
Step 1: Define the required assessment criteria and criteria values
Step 2: Assign assessment criteria to the relevant element types
Step 3: Create a grid and the elements with the relevant element type
Step 4: Do assessments and visualize the portfolio landscape
Step 1: Defining the required assessment criteria and criteria values in the Admin section
The first step to using portfolio-landscape assessments is to define the relevant assessment criteria and criteria values in the admin section. If you are not an admin user, contact the person/s with admin rights in your organization.
Click on the admin section in the profile drop-down and scroll to the bottom of the list to “Manage Custom Field Library”. Select this option.
Click on “Add new” in the top right of the list. Select “Criteria”. Here you need to complete the indicated fields. First give the criteria a name, for example, "Relationship strength". Then you can add a description.
Click on the “+” (add new) icon in the “Choices” section. “Option” is the name of the sub-criteria. So, in the case of Relationship strength, we can put: strong, medium, low, and very low, for example. Note: Option name and Value name should be the same. The “Legend” would be the description or meaning of the “option”. For example, "Strong" means that the relationship is very good. Now choose a color to represent the “option”.
Now add the rest of the options by clicking on the “+” icon.
By selecting “Allow empty”, you will not be required to assess, therefore it will appear as N/A.
“Mandatory” means that you will not be able to save if an assessment has not been made.
Select “Searchable”, which allows for filtering.
By selecting “Initiative” and “Element”, you make this criteria available to be used for assessing initiatives as well as elements.
Now you can click “Save”.
If you go back to the “Custom property” list, you will see your newly created criteria at the bottom.
Step 2: Assign assessment criteria to the relevant element types
In order to add assessment criteria to an element, you will first need to create an element type, which would then carry with it the assessment criteria.
The first step is to go to the admin section and scroll down to “Manage element types”. If you are not an admin user, contact the person/s with admin rights in your organization.
Click on the edit icon if you want to add the assessment criteria to an existing element type or click on “Add new” to add an additional element type. Give the element type a name, and select the modules you’d like to be available. Now select “Criterias”. Here you can click on the “+” icon and select the assessment criteria you have created. In this case, we select “Relationship Strength”
Click “Save” to continue.
When you return to the “element type list” you will see the new element type “Clients” appear at the bottom. Here you will also see which assessment criteria is linked to it.
Step 3: Create a grid and the elements with the relevant element type
You are now ready to start building your portfolio landscape. For this example, we chose to create a Client Portfolio Landscape.
Click on “Add new” in the “My matrixgrids”. Give your grid a name ex. Client landscape, and click “Save”.
Now you can start adding elements. When you add a new element, remember to select the correct element type e.g. “Clients”. This will ensure that the right assessment criteria for “clients” will be activated.
Now that you have added all your clients as elements, you can start the assessment process.
Step 4: Do assessments and visualize the portfolio landscape
In order to assess an element, you can either click on the status in the element, the assessment icon in the element tray or click on the element to go to the overview page.
Each assessment criteria will have a legend that describes the criteria.
As well as a change history icon and an information button ("i") in which each color is given a meaning or description.
You can now manually assess the element by clicking on the colors and a tick mark will appear in the center.
Once all the assessments have been made, you can click on “Filters” in the top right corner below your profile thumbnail. A tray will open with all the filters and patterns available in the grid. As all the elements type in this grid are “clients” you will only see the client element type criteria appear in the tray. Note: Performance is a default criteria (pattern) that cannot be removed. If an element status is switched to Automatic, you will not be able to manually edit the performance assessment.
Once you click on one of the assessment criteria (patterns), you will see the colors in the grid change.
If you click on “relationship strength” as a criteria, you will see the colors change accordingly. This new ability will allow you to detect patterns in the landscape as well as show you where your efforts need to be placed.
Here is an example: I would like to see which client generates the highest revenue.
By clicking on "+More" you can select "YOY Revenue Performance"
You can select to see only the clients with the highest generated revenue YOY.
You can also combine different patterns and filters by using the filtering option in the top tray. In the example below we combined "very low" and "low" relationship strength with the highest YOY revenue performance.
You can now dive deeper into each element to look at the reasons behind their apparent failure or success as well as get your team to work on change initiatives to achieve the desired outcome.
NOTE: If element types are mixed in a grid, all the assessment criteria will be visualized.