Hello APM Subcommittee Members:

Purpose

The purpose of this post is to start a discussion around a recurring challenge in capital planning and portfolio management, and to encourage members to share their experiences, viewpoints, and practical insights.

Discussion Topic:

Organizations may struggle with weak capital planning processes where projects lack clear definition and resource requirements. As a result, some capital projects are prioritized based on urgency, stakeholder influence, or internal politics rather than objective, strategic value.

Initial Discussion Questions:

To kickoff the discussion post, some initial questions are below:

1. What prioritizations or scoring approaches have you seen work well in practice?
2. How do you connect project prioritization to strategic objectives in a measurable way?
3. How do you achieve consistent project prioritization across programs or business units when project proposals may differ significantly in scope, asset type, and maturity?
4. What challenges have you faced (or seen others face) when introducing more objective, value-based prioritization, and how were they addressed?

Please feel free to share your thoughts, lessons learned, or examples from your own experience. The goal with this post is to foster an open exchange that can benefit practitioners across industries and maturity levels.

Best,

Lucas

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Lucas Keeton
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Hi Lucas,

I moved 3 years ago to the Asset Management team of my organization to help them to mature the program controls of the State of Good Repair Projects, this has been a steep learning curve and the main challenges these teams is the ability to reforecast their SOGR backlog due to lack of integrated data, their prioritization methodology primarily based on the risk exposure of asset conditions (very poor - good). 

This process is struggling to articulate later to handover to the project delivery teams and their ability to scope and therefore, meet timelines / budgets.

Ali Montaser and I have submitted for 2026 Conference a Technical Paper about this subject for the Rail Network Transportation, which is the sector we have worked on our last years. 

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Marifran Mihura
Sr Manager Program Controls
Metrolinx
Toronto - Canada
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Original Message:
Sent: 02-01-2026 02:40 PM
From: Lucas Keeton
Subject: Discussion Post: Prioritization & Portfolio Optimization Techniques

Hello APM Subcommittee Members:

Purpose

The purpose of this post is to start a discussion around a recurring challenge in capital planning and portfolio management, and to encourage members to share their experiences, viewpoints, and practical insights.

Discussion Topic:

Organizations may struggle with weak capital planning processes where projects lack clear definition and resource requirements. As a result, some capital projects are prioritized based on urgency, stakeholder influence, or internal politics rather than objective, strategic value.

Initial Discussion Questions:

To kickoff the discussion post, some initial questions are below:

1. What prioritizations or scoring approaches have you seen work well in practice?
2. How do you connect project prioritization to strategic objectives in a measurable way?
3. How do you achieve consistent project prioritization across programs or business units when project proposals may differ significantly in scope, asset type, and maturity?
4. What challenges have you faced (or seen others face) when introducing more objective, value-based prioritization, and how were they addressed?

Please feel free to share your thoughts, lessons learned, or examples from your own experience. The goal with this post is to foster an open exchange that can benefit practitioners across industries and maturity levels.

Best,

Lucas

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Lucas Keeton
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