Diagnosing Your Portfolio

Your situation is unlikely to be a pure and tidy example of a start-up, turnaround , realignment , or sustaining -success situation. At a high level your situation may fit reasonably neatly into one of these categories. But as soon as you drill down, you will almost certainly discover that you are managing a portfolio ”of products, projects, processes, plants, or people ”that represents a mix of ST _A RS situations. For instance, you may be taking over an organization that enjoys incremental growth with successful products and in which one group is launching a line of products based on a new technology. Or you may be working to turn around a company that has a couple of high-performing state-of-the-art plants.

Your final diagnostic step, then, is to figure out which parts of your new organization belong in each of the four ST _A RS categories. This exercise will help you to think systematically about challenges and opportunities in each piece. It will also supply you a common language with which to talk to your new team about why and how you are going to manage various pieces differently.

Take some time to assign the pieces in your new portfolio (products, processes, projects, plants, and people) to the four categories using the figure 3-3. Given this arrangement, how will you manage the various pieces differently? What do you need from them? What do they need from you?

Figure 3-3: Diagnosing Your Portfolio