Your roadmap is a list of bets dressed up as a plan. Risk and return live in slide decks, not in the mix you actually fund.
Modern Portfolio Theory, applied to your delivery pipeline. Fund a balanced mix, expose concentration, make trade-offs explicit.
- Modern Portfolio Theory
- VUCA framing
- Scenario analysis
The problem in depth
Most IT portfolios are lists. Big initiative, smaller initiative, smaller still, sorted by which sponsor shouted last. Risk and return are talked about in slide decks, never in the mix of work that actually gets funded.
The discipline of Modern Portfolio Theory exists for exactly this problem in finance: how do you compose a set of bets that, taken together, give you the return profile you want for the risk you can stomach.
I bring the same discipline to delivery portfolios. Same vocabulary, same maths, recast for an environment where "return" is value to the organisation and "volatility" is the variance in outcomes you should expect.
What I deliver
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Initiative scorecard
Each bet on the table characterised by expected value, range of outcomes, and correlation with the others on the table.
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Frontier view
A Markowitz-style frontier for your specific roadmap, showing the risk-return profile of every plausible mix of initiatives.
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Concentration map
Where your portfolio is overexposed: technology, sponsor, capability, or strategic theme.
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Scenario analysis
How the frontier shifts under VUCA-style shocks: a key vendor wobble, a regulatory change, a leadership transition.
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Funding-decision frame
A structured way for steering committees to compare initiatives without falling back to whoever last presented.
How I work
I work with finance, strategy, and the business sponsors who own each initiative. The output is rarely "fund this, kill that". It is usually "this set of three is mispriced relative to risk, and your funding mix is creating a concentration you cannot defend".
Worked example
A digital-platform portfolio that looked balanced on a list but was 70 percent correlated with a single underlying vendor. The frontier view made the exposure visible, and the next funding cycle moved 18 percent of capacity to genuinely uncorrelated bets without changing total spend.
Efficient frontier for the in-flight portfolio
Each dot is a possible mix of initiatives. The curve is the best return achievable for each level of risk. Today's mix is well off the frontier; the optimised mix sits on it.
Discuss a viable portfolio engagement.
A 30-minute conversation is enough to know if we should keep talking.