Turn Plans into Results: SPM Meets Adaptive Workforce Solutions

Imagine: You’re charged with leading a multi-year, multi-million-dollar digital transformation for your organization. But halfway through, it’s become clear that the program isn’t delivering the expected results. Deadlines have been missed, budgets are overrun, and you’re starting to lose the trust of stakeholders. Maybe you attribute this to lack of consistency in project execution management, poor visibility and inconsistent execution across teams, or disparate data silos to the mismatched digital tools your teams using and everything in between.

Sound familiar? This scenario plays out more often than you’d think, and it can be catastrophic for organizational change. When organizations skip proper change management, their transformation projects become seven times more likely to fail. The cost of these failures isn’t just financial; it’s the erosion of trust, momentum, and competitive advantage. But here’s what’s possible when you get it right: a 77 percent increase in potential profitability. The difference isn’t luck or timing; it’s having the right approach from the start.

More specifically, it’s the unique combination of two powerful approaches: Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) and Adaptive Workforce Solutions. Together, they create a system that keeps you moving forward even when circumstances change. Imagine the outcomes your organization could achieve if you could:

• Stay agile and pivot quickly when market conditions change
• Connect your enterprise so every department works toward shared priorities
• Eliminate the guesswork in resource planning and talent allocation
• Drive sustainable transformation and build lasting organizational strength that survives market volatility

We’re sharing three real-world examples of this combo in action along with tips your organization can implement to consistently unlock value. Let’s begin.

Adaptive Workforce Solutions: Agile, Scalable, Outcome-driven

When priorities shift mid-stream—as they so often do—you need people who can shift with them. That’s where an Adaptive Workforce Solution comes into play, providing a flexible, scalable, and outcomes-based partnership that works with you to proactively anticipate capability needs.

The key is creating a collaborative partnership that’s built on trust and transparency and evolves alongside your portfolio of initiatives. By focusing on key areas where strategic investments lie (pinpointed by SPM), an Adaptive Workforce Solution partner can deliver high-performing, specialized expertise, while remaining agile enough to pivot when your needs change.

This isn't about bringing in consultants who disappear after delivering a report. It's about embedding skilled experts directly into your operations, building your internal capabilities, then stepping back once your team can run independently. Think of it as strategic workforce planning that anticipates what's coming next.

Leveraging an Adaptive Workforce Solutions partner who is aligned to your vision can be a strong driver of value. Here’s how it works in practice:

1. You get ahead of resource crunches. Instead of scrambling when you need specific expertise, data-driven demand planning identifies upcoming needs early. When that critical phase hits, the right people are already onboarded and ready.
2. Overhead costs drop significantly. Skip the recruiting, training, and administrative costs that come with major initiatives. Your internal teams stay focused on core business activities while specialized support handles transformation work.
3. Your people get stronger, not dependent. Every engagement includes maturity assessments, skills calibration, and specific capability transfer targets. The goal is always to make your workforce more capable, not more reliant on outside help.
4. Quality stays consistent. You get proven methodologies and governance processes that have worked across industries, plus insights from similar transformations that help you avoid pitfalls.

REAL-WORLD APPLICATION: Throughout an eight-year partnership with a leading British multinational postal service, the entity has experienced significant improvements in resource optimization, performance management, and quality assurance. By adopting our innovative resourcing approaches (i.e., Managed Services), which go beyond traditional headcount or role-based models, it has been able to effectively meet resource demands while maintaining a high level of operational efficiency.

Turn Your Strategy into Reality with Strategic Portfolio Management

Adopting tools like NH360 Strategic Portfolio Manager can be a transformative step for your business, enabling you to turn your strategy into a reality. It provides a comprehensive, real-time view of your investments, allowing you to make decisions that are data-driven, aligned with your objectives, and will optimize every dollar for maximum impact.

A powerful SPM tool can also help you track efficiencies and manage talent by providing clear metrics and visibility into resource allocation. The outcome? You're able to make more informed decisions about where to focus your efforts and invest your resources. This is crucial for effectively managing costs in today's fast-paced business environment, where the ability to pivot quickly can mean all the difference between success and failure.

Here’s how Strategic Portfolio Management can help you tackle the main culprits of value erosion head-on:

1. Misalignment. SPM makes it easier to prioritize investments by assessing their strategic impact and value. This means that resources are allocated to initiatives that directly support your organization's goals, aligning everyone's efforts with your strategic vision.
2. Siloed thinking and decision-making. A strategic portfolio manager provides complete visibility across your investments, which helps break down barriers and enhance collaboration.
3. Poor delivery. With full visibility into your investments, SPM helps you proactively identify and mitigate risks while measuring portfolio performance against key metrics. This keeps you on track and allows you to adapt as needed to deliver successful outcomes.
4. Inability to pivot. Strategic Portfolio Management supports your ability to employ scenario thinking and planning, so you can stay agile and responsive as organizational needs and market dynamics shift.

REAL-WORLD APPLICATION: Consider our recent work with an oil and gas company. The company needed to manage roughly 2,000 initiatives, a task that would be insurmountable for any enterprise without the right tools and approach. With SPM, however, the company organized and streamlined approximately $1.3 billion of capital and operating investments. By leveraging Strategic Portfolio Management, leaders strengthened visibility across resources and project site capabilities. And, armed with a view of the entire portfolio, they made more informed decisions, funded and executed the right initiatives, and allocated resources optimally to maximize business value.

The Ultimate Power Couple: SPM and Managed Services

So now that you know more about each solution, let’s talk about what happens when SPM and Managed Services come together. When combined, they create a powerful combination that addresses the end-to-end needs of managing a strategic portfolio.

Integrating SPM and Adaptive Workforce Solutions allows organizations to benefit from a continuous cycle of strategic alignment, efficient execution, and continuous optimization. This combination enables you to respond to dynamic market conditions and customer needs while maximizing the value of your investments.

Here’s a quick look at how:

1. Strategy meets execution seamlessly. SPM creates a strategic lens for identifying and prioritizing initiatives that will drive the greatest business value. Meanwhile, the Adaptive Workforce Solution complements this by offering the flexible resource capacity you need to execute.
2. You see things clearly. Leaders need a clear, consistent view of portfolio and business health. SPM provides that with real-time metrics and reporting that helps you keep your fingers on the pulse of performance—along with insights to course correct as needed. An agile portfolio prioritization governance model takes this a step further, helping you examine performance rigorously and make data-driven decisions to maximize every investment.
3. Talent gaps get filled fast. A strategic portfolio manager can spot resource and expertise gaps before they become roadblocks. Adaptive Workforce Solutions then helps you rapidly fill these gaps with on-demand access to specialized talent.
4. Transformation sticks. SPM provides strategic guidance to help you navigate even the most unexpected market changes. Adaptive Workforce Solutions support long-term capability creation and knowledge transfer. This combo ensures that your organization doesn't just weather delivery challenges, but emerges even stronger.

REAL-WORLD APPLICATION: Our partnership with a leading infrastructure business illustrates the power of combining these two solutions. As the lead portfolio partner, North Highland set out to assemble a team that worked closely with leadership to reorganize the operating model and governance. Using a 'right-size' approach, the team established consistency and best practices across the program, significantly increasing efficiencies. This partnership enabled the program to swiftly respond and reorganize its 1,000+ strong workforce. Initially deploying a team of around 20 people to a single workstream, we flexibly adapted as demand shifted, seamlessly moving between workstreams and building in-house capabilities to maximize value. The result? A transformed organization, empowered to navigate change with agility and resilience.

Your Next Steps

Having a solid plan doesn’t guarantee success. Today’s executive needs an approach that seamlessly aligns strategy with execution, optimizes resources, connects your entire enterprise, and consistently delivers results. It sounds like a tall order, but the combination of Strategic Portfolio Management and Adaptive Workforce Solutions offers a powerful framework to achieve just that.

With this combination, you can tackle complex initiatives with confidence because you’ll have the visibility to make smart decisions, the flexibility to adapt when conditions change, and the expertise to execute at the level your strategy demands.

Consider your deadlines consistently met, your budgets on track, your enterprise connected and aligned toward a common goal, and a sustainable competitive advantage that allows you to stay ahead of the curve.

 

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Erik Raper Sr. Managing DirectorRead full bio