Stop the Struggle: Taming Planning Overheads, Silos, and Low Predictability
Executives know the feeling. Planning major initiatives often becomes a heavy coordination exercise instead of a strategic one. Significant time and effort go into trying to align business divisions that are each pushing their own priorities—long before delivery even begins.
If your organisation is dealing with:
Excessive planning overheads
Constant dependency management
Fierce capability contention
Low delivery predictability
…the issue is not your people. It’s the friction created when multiple divisions pursue competing priorities within a functionally-aligned structure.
The Core Problem: When Competing Priorities Kill Predictability
In functionally aligned organisations, each division focuses on its own operational goals. While this supports specialisation, it becomes a major bottleneck when you need coordinated delivery across the enterprise to deliver impactful initiatives.
The real challenge arises here.
The Breakdown Trap
Enterprise priorities must be interpreted and broken down by each division. This creates competing interpretations, competing needs, and ultimately competing demands for shared capabilities.
Siloed Planning Driven by Divisional Priorities
Planning becomes a negotiation between divisions, each making assumptions about capacity, sequencing, and dependencies. Plans end up built on divisional viewpoints rather than shared clarity.
Friction in the System
Without a single source of truth or an agreed process for resolving competing priorities, divisions naturally advocate for their own agendas. This leads to capability contention, misalignment, and unpredictability.
This model is difficult to scale because it requires constant effort just to coordinate and realign divisions around common goals.
The Scalabl Solution: Achieving “Zero-Daylight” Alignment
The good news is you don’t always need a major organisational restructure. What you need is a prioritisation approach that resolves competing demands early—before work cascades into conflict and re-planning.
Scalabl’s Organisational Alignment and Prioritisation process provides the discipline and consistency needed to reduce friction caused by divisional competition.
Our philosophy is simple: when divisions align around a shared prioritisation approach, execution becomes faster, clearer, and more predictable.
1. “Zero-Daylight” Alignment Workshops
We begin with the executive team. Through structured workshops, we remove all gaps and assumptions between divisions and establish an explicit, shared understanding of enterprise-wide decision-making criteria. This eliminates early misalignment—where most friction begins.
2. Framework Definition
We co-design a prioritisation framework tailored to your context. It combines quantitative scoring with targeted qualitative discussion forums so divisions can align on a single enterprise-wide list of priorities, in a repeatable way. This becomes the foundation for organisation-wide clarity.
3. Disciplined Prioritisation Rhythm
We co-design a structured rhythm of activities and decision points that ensures divisions regularly come together to review, adjust, and recommit to shared priorities. This increases accountability and reduces the need for constant escalation when divisions compete for shared capabilities.
The Results: Prioritisation Becomes a Strength
By resolving competing priorities early and consistently, organisations gain the clarity needed to operate with confidence—even within functional structures.
For more than 7 years we’ve consistently seen results like these:
59% increase in delivery predictability
57% increase in quarterly goal clarity
25% increase in realistic team plans
With a disciplined prioritisation rhythm, divisions adapt to changes faster and with less rework, preventing cascading delays.
Scalabl’s approach helps teams stop competing with one another—and start delivering on what matters most for the organisation.
Ready to Turn Prioritisation into a Core Strength?
Reduce friction, reclaim focus, and eliminate the overhead created by competing divisional priorities. It’s time to replace guesswork with a clear, shared, enterprise-wide prioritisation model.
Click to learn more about Scalabl’s Organisational Alignment and Prioritisation service.
