A useful portfolio review brings the claims together and tests what the business should kill, keep or look at a recovery. It also recognises that some work must continue, while other activities need a managed transition rather than an immediate verdict.
Every substantial piece of work usually has somebody who can explain why it must continue.
The legacy service generates attractive margins. The new platform protects future relevance. The struggling programme supports important customers. A low-use service fulfils an obligation. Another initiative is almost finished, provided it receives a little more time and money.
Those explanations may all contain truth. Leadership still has finite money, people and attention.
The quality of those decisions depends on understanding what the organisation must protect, what it can change and how the choices affect one another. Evidence, ownership and the practical consequences of each decision matter throughout the review.
Establish what is genuinely open to choice
Low usage or a weak financial return does not automatically make an activity optional.
Regulatory duties, contractual commitments and customer dependencies may require the business to sustain something it would otherwise withdraw. A service may also support another offer whose performance looks healthy only because the underlying cost sits elsewhere.
Public phone boxes illustrate the distinction. Ofcom requires BT and KCOM to provide them to meet reasonable public needs, with specific protections governing removal. The decision cannot be reduced to whether an individual box generates an attractive return.
The same principle applies inside less regulated businesses. A maintenance obligation, minimum supplier commitment or customer migration requirement may constrain an exit.
Before reviewing performance, establish what must be provided, for how long and on what terms. Separate genuine obligations from assumptions that have never been checked.
Mandatory work still deserves scrutiny. Leadership may be able to simplify delivery, reduce avoidable cost, renegotiate an agreement or prepare a permitted withdrawal. The obligation defines the boundary within which those choices must be made.
Separate the offer from what makes it valuable
An established product can become so closely identified with the business that withdrawing it feels like abandoning the company’s purpose.
The more useful question is what customers still need and which capabilities, relationships or assets allow the organisation to meet that need.
RELX provides an example. Its development from publishing towards information-based analytics and decision tools shows how accumulated information and professional expertise can support different offers. Print has not disappeared entirely: its 2025 reporting retains print and print-related activities separately from its four main business areas. The important change is that the historic format no longer defines the principal proposition.
Rolls-Royce illustrates a different route. Under TotalCare, customers pay per engine flying hour, while Rolls-Royce takes responsibility for time-on-wing and shop-visit cost risks. The engine remains central, but the service model changes what the customer buys and which risks the supplier carries.
These are different histories, not templates to copy. They suggest a practical distinction: an existing offer may need to change while the capability behind it remains valuable.
Before discarding an activity, identify what is worth preserving. Before protecting it, establish whether its current form still serves the customer and the business.
Legacy and new must be examined together
In telecoms businesses, private circuits generated substantial revenues at high margins. Introducing fibre-to-the-premises weakened that established revenue stream.
Protecting the old offer nevertheless would not have prevented competitors from providing alternatives. Those businesses had to consider what customers would choose if they delayed the transition.
The leadership decision concerned both the future proposition and the economics of getting there. How much legacy cash could support investment? How quickly would customers migrate? Which costs would remain as revenue fell? What capability was needed to serve the new market?
Judging the two offers independently could favour the profitable legacy business while making the replacement appear unattractive. Examining them together exposes the consequences of waiting.
A transition may require temporarily keeping the old service, investing in the new one and withdrawing legacy capacity in stages. Each phase needs ownership and conditions for moving forward.
Kill: establish when stopping is justified
Stopping deserves a clear case. It may be appropriate when the original need has disappeared, the expected benefit no longer justifies the remaining cost, another activity provides the same value, or the conditions required for recovery cannot realistically be created.
A promising offer can also be too early. The technology may not yet deliver reliably enough, or wider customer adoption may take longer and cost more than the business can sustain. These are different constraints: better execution cannot necessarily resolve either within an affordable period. Recognising future potential does not oblige the organisation to fund the journey indefinitely.
A programme may also be viable in isolation but consume people or funding needed for a more important commitment. Portfolio judgement must consider that opportunity cost.
The money already spent belongs in the explanation of what happened. It does not establish that further spending is justified. The next decision should compare the likely value of continuing with the remaining costs, risks and credible alternatives, including exit.
Nor should poor performance alone settle the matter. A weak result could reflect a recoverable delivery problem, an essential dependency or an obligation the business must fulfil.
Once stopping is justified, define exactly what will stop. Leadership might cancel an initiative, discontinue a product, retire a feature, close a route to market or withdraw one service while preserving the capability behind it.
Examine the consequences
Who depends on it? Which promises must be honoured? What happens to customers, contracts, data, assets and people? Which other activities need to change?
An accountable owner should manage the exit, with resources and a completion point. Cancellation does not make the remaining work disappear, and savings may arrive later than expected.
Closure can also mean people losing their jobs. A sound business rationale does not make that consequence easy or remove leadership’s responsibility for how it is handled. The exit needs time and resources for meaningful consultation, clear communication and support for affected people, alongside continuity for customers. A recommendation to develop a closure proposal should leave room for that process to inform the outcome.
The final test is what stopping releases. If the same people remain occupied indefinitely by unsupported customers and unresolved dependencies, the portfolio has changed on paper without gaining usable capacity.
Keep: continue for an explicit reason
Keeping an activity should be a positive decision with a stated purpose.
It may earn its place through commercial contribution, customer value, strategic capability, an essential dependency or a continuing obligation. Leadership should identify which reason applies and what level of support is proportionate.
A legacy offer might be kept for cash generation during migration, with controlled investment and clear withdrawal triggers. A growing service might warrant additional capacity. A mandatory activity may need a sustainable operating model.
These require different expectations. Giving all three the same growth target would obscure their actual roles.
Set a review point and the evidence that would change the decision. Otherwise, keeping becomes the default outcome whenever nobody has made a sufficiently forceful case to stop.
Recovery: change the conditions, then test the result
Recovery needs more than a revised deadline or another injection of funding.
What is causing the problem? What will change? Is the required capability available? Can the organisation give the work the authority and attention it needs?
A delivery programme may recover once ownership is clarified and competing priorities are removed. A product may need a narrower customer focus or a different commercial proposition. A transition may need better migration support.
Those are interventions whose effects can be tested.
Agree the recovery owner, resources, evidence of progress and the point at which leadership will reconsider support. Include conditions that would justify stopping earlier.
Repeatedly extending a deadline while leaving the causes untouched commits the organisation to the same problem again.
Establish the evidence behind each choice
Keep the initial discussion to a manageable group of significant decisions. Each item needs a short brief covering:
- Its purpose and current contribution.
- Actual performance and the outlook.
- Remaining costs and demands on capacity.
- Obligations, dependencies and exit consequences.
- The impact on employees and the work required to support a responsible transition or closure.
- The proposed direction and material uncertainties.
Where legacy and new are connected, present them together. Include customer evidence where internal confidence depends on what customers will buy, adopt or tolerate.
Missing evidence should be visible. Where it could materially change the decision, assign a focused investigation with an owner and a deadline. Where enough is known to act, further analysis should have a clear purpose.
Make the decisions work across the portfolio
Several individually reasonable decisions can still form an impossible plan. Three recoveries may all depend on the same technical specialists. A closure may occupy the people expected to launch its replacement. A legacy service may need investment to remain reliable until customers can migrate.
Leadership needs to compare the combined demands with the capacity, funding and authority actually available. That may require sequencing the work, narrowing a recovery or delaying an exit until an essential dependency has been addressed.
The review should expose these trade-offs rather than accept every item’s justification separately. Each agreed direction needs an accountable owner, the next action and a review point. Where further evidence or approval is required, specify what is needed and by when.
Returning to the portfolio then means checking whether those decisions have changed the position: has capacity been released, has recovery improved performance, and is the transition becoming more achievable?
A decision must change what happens next
Stopping should produce a managed exit and identifiable capacity. Keeping should carry a clear purpose and appropriate expectations. Recovery should change the conditions and have boundaries. Transition should protect continuity while moving the business towards a viable future.
Oak CORE and Oak Consult’s project recovery support help leaders examine those connections when internal conversations have become circular or individual priorities no longer form a workable whole.
The purpose of portfolio review is to make commitments deliberate. A decision is useful when the business understands what it must sustain, what it can change and what each choice makes possible.
Sources
- Ofcom: Protecting essential phone boxes, guidance on public call-box provision and removal.
- RELX Annual Report 2025 / Form 20-F, business overview and separate reporting of print and print-related activities.
- Rolls-Royce: TotalCare, service scope, payment mechanism and risk allocation.