What are the best practices for selecting key initiatives for your company when managing a lean portfolio?

Especially with M&A, there are three kinds of value to look at and evaluate. The first one is strategic value—your alignment to the corporate goals or vision, whether you are a proper market fit and what features you’re bringing to the table. Are we going to accomplish our purpose and our outcome?

The second is business value: What are the things that the organization will contribute? And the third is operational value. So when you are building your portfolio and have a list of all these initiatives and all the work happening within the organization, you start evaluating it using these three kinds of value. You’ll probably start viewing it from a value-centric perspective rather than just an operational or business perspective.

You have to look at it from the perspective of business value. Think about lean as a concept and where it came from: lean manufacturing, etc. I come from the manufacturing world, so I think about it in lean terms. Think about what adds value to the business and what tasks don't add value. So in terms of mergers and acquisitions, what pieces of that company are adding value and which pieces are not?

Is doing payroll and finance forecasting adding value to the business or not? Is that something you want to merge by assimilation and use your own processes in that company? How do you properly merge the pieces that add value into the company so that you're gaining that value?