Vestas case

Vestas, a global wind-energy company, operated in a complex product-development environment with many departments, suppliers, technical dependencies and long product lifecycles.

The organization had established an improvement programme based on maturity assessment recommendations. However, improvement activity was widespread, locally driven and difficult to govern as one coherent portfolio.

More than 140 active improvement initiatives were identified across the organization. Many were valuable local initiatives, but the combined improvement landscape lacked a clear executive and PMO-level overview.

The challenge was not lack of improvement activity.

The challenge was whether the improvement portfolio was improving the organization in the right way.

Senior management and the PMO needed a practical way to answer questions such as:

• Which improvement initiatives were most valuable?

• Which initiatives had a realistic chance of succeeding?

• Which initiatives needed stronger PMO or management support?

• Which initiatives should be re-scoped, de-prioritized or reconsidered?

• Was the organization improving its ability to improve?

• Could progress be visualized in a way that supported leadership decisions?

This was not simply a project-list problem.

It was a portfolio governance problem.

As part of the Whitebox advisory work, I was centrally involved in applying an assessment-based portfolio approach that combined two executive decision dimensions:

1. Expected value — the expected impact of an initiative on organizational maturity, performance or strategic goals.

2. Predicted success — the assessed likelihood that the initiative would actually succeed.

The work helped create a structured way to evaluate improvement initiatives, compare them and discuss them as a portfolio.

The advisory contribution included:

• Structuring a large and fragmented improvement portfolio

• Supporting the evaluation of more than 140 improvement initiatives

• Selecting the most relevant initiatives for deeper assessment

• Conducting interview-based evaluations of improvement projects

• Assessing each initiative’s likelihood of success using ImprovAbility parameters

• Estimating expected impact on organizational maturity and strategic goals

• Creating a portfolio view of value versus predicted success

• Providing PMO and leadership with decision-ready insight

• Repeating the analysis over several rounds to track development and improvement capability

In the first round, 40 initiatives were selected for evaluation, and 37 were assessed through interviews. Later rounds showed how stronger prioritization, management attention and PMO support changed the portfolio picture over time.

The work turned a hidden and fragmented improvement landscape into a management-visible portfolio.

It helped leadership distinguish between:

• High-value initiatives with a high chance of success

• High-value initiatives needing stronger management support

• Initiatives with good execution potential but limited strategic impact

• Initiatives that should be reconsidered, re-scoped or given a different priority

The analysis also identified portfolio-level patterns that affected the likelihood of success across initiatives, including weaknesses in deployment strategy and deployment means.

Over repeated evaluation rounds, the selected initiatives showed improved expected impact and improved chance of success. The organization became more comfortable with its ability to improve and developed a stronger basis for prioritizing improvement work against strategic goals and business cases.

For my current owner-side governance advisory, this case is highly relevant because it demonstrates the ability to create executive portfolio insight in a complex development organization.

It shows how scattered activity can be turned into a governance view that supports better decisions.

Complex organizations often have plenty of improvement activity.

The sponsor challenge is to govern that activity toward the highest value and the highest realistic chance of success.

A portfolio should not be governed only by activity, budget or ambition. It should be governed by expected value, realistic likelihood of success and the management support required to improve both.

• Portfolio governance

• PMO and senior leadership decision support

• Value versus likelihood-of-success assessment

• Maturity and capability improvement

• Progress visualization

• Assessment-based pattern recognition

• Improvement portfolio prioritization

• Translation of complex project data into management action

• Governance of organizational improvement in a global product-development environment