Goal of this stage: Sound early-warning alarms on misalignment on priorities or unreasonable expectations around capacity. Force org-wide commitment to what we definitely aren’t doing.

If you have a really high trust environment, or risk tollerant environment, or your priorities change so often that investing more effort to gain certainty probably isn’t worth it, then stop here. But know that you can’t hold anyone accountable to hitting this project list if you stop here. That doesn’t mean this exercise was not valuable! In organizations I’ve been a part of that only get this far, we’ve seen tremendous value, already, simply from the clarity, transparency and visibility that this process brings.

Why can’t you expect commitment? What you have so far is better than wild guessing, for sure, but also contains so much uncertainty that it’s impossible to make a real commitment to. You can still improve the odds, though, that you actually do hit this plan, such as it is, even though it’s bursting with uncertainty. See (here) for strategies for managing to this kind of plan, anyway (e.g. timeboxing, moving risk to the front, checkin milestones)

It’s really important that you get organization-wide commitment to the prioritization (and the likely cut line) before you go to the next step. Do not proceed until you do, if you can help it. You need to have the hard conversations of “hey, so, we’re still running the numbers, but it looks very likely that XYZ thing that you’re really passionate about isn’t going to make the cut this quarter. Is that a problem? If so, what would you trade off for it from this list of things? Nothing? Well, that’s a problem then. Let’s talk about it.”

If you fail to do this step well, the following steps will absolutely suffer.