Beyond Project Status: Gain Better Insight into Enterprise Delivery

In the ever-evolving landscape of enterprise portfolio and project management, this month’s release by StrategyBlocks offers a powerful new metric function: BLOCK COUNT IN LEVEL. This offers a significant enhancement in how we can measure and enhance our strategic execution. This new calculated metric function complements the external numbers, those leading and lagging key performance indicators, required to determine strategic success; it opens up a world of analytics insights that empower organizations to take charge of their delivery performance.

At its core, BLOCK COUNT IN LEVEL counts the number of blocks at any given level of your strategic plan, where each block represents a distinct piece of defined work. For non-StrategyBlocks readers, a block is an initiative, portfolio, project, or high-level goal that describes a specific discrete piece of strategic work; together these blocks are foundational to understanding and communicating your strategic design. But where this feature offers greatest value is its ability to categorize these blocks based on their delivery status:

  • not started
  • behind target
  • in range of target
  • ahead of target
  • completed

Taking Performance a Step Further

So let’s explore what you can do to expand this feature. Effectively you can compare performance across your entire enterprise contextually. By applying simple math to calculate the percentage of projects falling behind targets against the total number of projects, you gain actionable insights that drive resource decision-making and prioritization.

Moving beyond simple ratios, StrategyBlocks tracks activity delivery over time and automatically aggregates progress reports from bottom-to-top within your strategic framework. This gives us an opportunity to assess not just where we stand today, but also how our delivery performance has evolved over time. Are we improving our delivery as a team? And therefore, are our strategies yielding better outcomes?

This dimension adds depth to our understanding as we strive for excellence in execution and continuous improvement.

Dashboarding Strategic Delivery Performance

Let’s now take our new delivery performance metrics and build them into a real-time StrategyBlocks dashboard. Above is my dashboard to track a specific level of my strategic plan, “Our Portfolios” is a key level of our strategic plan that bridges the gap between strategic vision and lower tactical/operational levels (projects, objectives, actions etc.). I need to see how we are doing right now, but crucially, I need this in the context of the past, are we improving?

Introducing the StreamPie: A New Data Visualization for the Modern Age

To properly showcase the insights that BLOCK COUNT IN LEVEL delivers, I found myself looking for something new other than the traditional static charts that could only tell half the story. Pie charts excel at showing proportional relationships at a single point in time, while stream charts beautifully illustrate how categories flow and change over time, but what if you need both perspectives simultaneously? Enter the StreamPie (patent pending, naturally). This hybrid approach allows you to see both the current state of your delivery, with each slice representing the proportion of blocks in each status category, while the underlying stream provides the crucial temporal context of how these proportions have shifted over months or quarters.

A Note on Attribution

And yes, before you ask, I am absolutely claiming inventor’s rights to the StreamPie, if this catches on in the business intelligence world, I expect full attribution and perhaps a small consulting fee for training sessions on proper StreamPie interpretation techniques.