We think that no matter where you are on the portfolio management maturity journey you will gain significant value from using AppO.

Generally, every significant organisation has a portfolio of investments and can generate business value from AppO immediately. We base this on the knowledge that all such organisations already have an investment governance process, which already includes most, if not all, of the information required for AppO to produce meaningful results. Since we have never heard of any other product capable of universality (One value model used to select and prioritise all investments, regardless of type) and we have never heard of any organisation that has achieved universality, we believe that all organisations are on a journey to mature their governance processes, a journey that is simplified and accelerated using AppO. With AppO the steps to maturation will be more easily identified and executed.

AppO is very sophisticated software but so too are products like Chat Gpt, Jira, MS Project Server, the MS Office Suite, etc. These are just examples of software that can be configured and used at varying levels of sophistication to produce results generally driven by the capability and knowledge of the user.

AppO can be operated, using most of its power, by portfolio, program, and project managers, generally without significant training, because it embodies a substantial on-line knowledgebase and help system. In any case, Kepa Software can provide product training that can result in registration as an Accredited AppO Professional after demonstration of appropriate levels of understanding though work examples. AppO accredited professionals are able to use the full power of AppO. We recognise that not everyone will be able to grasp the full capability, however, Kepa Software can provide you with an assessment of the potential of individuals whom you think may be appropriate and we can guide your organisation on its journey to maturity.

Complexity relates to the ability to comprehend. We agree that AppO may be difficult for some people to grasp and use effectively but they are generally people with relatively low knowledge and experience levels.

AppO implements portfolio prioritisation, a very complex subject, which is generally only well understood by those professionals with understanding of portfolio, program, and project management. It also implements some very complex components of decision science.  Most people with operational knowledge of one or more of those subjects should be able to use the software to advantage but individuals who also have an understanding of applied finance could become power users.

In any case, most of the complexity is embodied within the "black box" of application code so using the software is vastly simplified over any other methods.

Users can be trained to use the full power of AppO in under 16 hours of learning if they have appropriate underlying knowledge.

Another area of possible complexity relates to the proposed Value Model which, if the organisation is driving towards universality (one  Value Model to assess ALL investments against each other), will always be a team effort, with representatives from finance, strategy, and portfolio management making recommendations to the executive team. All organisations with an investment governance process already have a Value Model that was probably created using those same talented individuals, and their knowledge can be matured over time to achieve universality, if that is deemed appropriate. 

Kepa Software, supported by our consulting partners together with our AppO Accredited Professional training, will accelerate your journey to mature portfolio prioritisation and even to universality.

No problem.

If you have anyone with any of applied finance, program, project, or portfolio management knowledge and experience we can help those people to produce high-quality results from AppO after undergoing AppO accreditation training.

Our AppO accreditation training will impart knowledge of how to use AppO to support the universe of business decision-making, not just one type of decision or one portfolio. We can teach them how to overcome a myriad of problems , as well as provide pragmatic guidelines on “Do’s and Don’ts”, "Why's" and "Why not's". Our training includes working with the individual after formal training to ensure they can pragmatically use AppO to solve your business problems. Once the individual completes the training and has demonstrated they can solve your business problems they will be awarded the status of AppO Accredited Professional.

Most organisations intending to use AppO will have a relatively small data cleansing requirement focused on the data used in their governance processes. The requirement generally stems from AppO requiring rigour where it has possibly been limited in the past. Surely data cleansing must form part of the portfolio management process for every organisation, thus we see data cleansing as part of the process of maturing portfolio management.

Regardless, AppO can, and has in the past, produced meaningful results with existing data and may even highlight potential requirements for data cleansing. For example, if there is no estimate available for any Value Measure, the lack of data will be highlighted in any AppO tabular analysis. Also, data not within range will result in a warning message. Additionally, unclean data will drive AppO analyses to be skewed, which, of course, will be recognised by knowledgeable stakeholders and corrected.

As the user base for AppO grows the range of problems and decisions addressed in terms of type, number, and complexity is growing. It has now been proven over a large range of problems. If you can describe your problem, it is highly likely there is sufficient talent among your personnel, our personnel and our consulting partners for you address and solve any problem.

We do not know of any organisation that has achieved universality (One Value Model used to select and prioritise all investments, regardless of class or type) so we maintain that all organisations are already on the journey to mature their investment governance process. 

You have to start somewhere and using AppO will simplify and accelerate the maturation of your governance processes, probably with much less effort than you would otherwise incur.

Helping to bring executive managers into consensus on a detailed definition of business value for your organisation is one of the design criteria behind AppO.

In practice what is of importance to one stakeholder within an organisation, let’s say the Marketing Director (increased revenue, increased reach) or Production Director (operational efficiency, simplified processes, lower skill base required), may indeed be different from another stakeholder within the same organisation such as the CEO (share price, shareholder feedback, board priorities), Auditor (risk management, audit trail, governance), Finance Director (return on investment, risk management, process integration) or CIO (Operational efficiency, data and process security, scalability and flexibility). This means that all of these individuals have differing views that impact their assessment of what constitutes business value to their role in the organisation. Thus it can be very difficult to come to consensus and often the most strident or powerful stakeholder holds sway.

For each manager to have confidence that the outcomes of initiatives are appropriate for their sphere of influence value must be measured for each value driver across their sphere of influence. However, the collective or aggregated view of all these value drivers must somehow be developed to understand the consensus view of true business value specific to the whole organisation.

AppO can model unlimited Value Measures in an unlimited hierarchical structure, while also taking unlimited individual or collective views into account when assessing investments, showing each individual which of the potential investments are of greatest value to them in their sphere of influence against an agreed consensus. Of course, AppO aggregate those views to a logical consensus view prior to comparing outcomes of each individual view with each other individual view and the consensus view.

To do this AppO collects the opinions of each manager of what the Value Measures should be and their relative importance to that person. AppO then automatically generates the logical consensus position between all managers opinions and analyses the impact on the portfolio of each individual opinion and the consensus position.

AppO also includes opinion divergence analysis, which will highlights the quantum of differences in opinion across all opinions submitted, and generates a visual of the range of opinions.

By using both artefacts, the portfolio impact analysis and the opinion divergence analysis, you should be fully equipped to support the executive discussion on the validity of each Value Measure in the context of the whole organisation and each person's sphere of influence, thus enabling transparency in driving to an agreed consensus Value Model. Continuing to analyse the portfolio against varying opinions simply provides transparency to the organisational leadership.

Put simply, we have no competitors because AppO is ahead of the curve, we expect high levels of competition as knowledge of what value can be derived using AppO spreads. AppO is both evolutionary and revolutionary. It is the only product we know of that can be used to develop universality  (One Value Model used to assess and prioritise all capital investments regardless of asset class or type).

The three tools we recognise as potential competitors, (New Zealand, U.S.A. and U.K.), appear to have their origins in decision science and, in one case, has added program and project management knowledge to decision science. AppO’s origin is the other way around, coming from Project Portfolio Management and supplemented by decision science, applied finance, and very significant experience in both governments and listed corporations.

We recognise 146 features that we would like to be able to offer our clients, of those we already offer 131 and we have announced that another 11 will soon be available in our product roadmap. Our nearest competitors offer 24, 24, and 20 respectively of those 146.

Additionally, there are a myriad of MCDA-based products seemingly available globally. The majority seem to be developed and used in academic environments. This supports our hypothesis that decision science has not yet "Come of age" in tertiary education in business, thus the general lack of understanding, confusion, and the mistaken belief that you can develop a working MCDA solution in a spreadsheet. There is also the mistaken belief that it is possible to perform serious MCDA on phones that have very limited computing power.

But AppO goes a long way past basic MCDA and includes significant extensions to globally accepted decision science processes (and mathematics) and is the only product that can potentially deliver universality.

We think that this objection may originate from misunderstanding portfolio prioritisation.

All businesses are subject to change driven from external pressures like market disruptors, legislation, compliance, even currency fluctuations. They are also subject to change from internal pressures like personnel changes, structure changes, new applications and processes. Additionally, there are always new suggestions to improve the business, or change the approach to investments that need to be considered in the context of the portfolio.

Then, there will always be changes to proposed investments due to additional learnings about those investments, especially when the investments are complex transformation initiatives or major infrastructure initiatives that take a long time to deliver.

All of these changes have the potential to impact the relative business value for one or more potential investments which, in turn, will cause changes in prioritisation.

Your first foray into AppO usage will produce real business value but if you then stop using AppO you will be ignoring the changes that are happening perhaps daily and you will be ignoring the ongoing significant value to be derived from the relatively minor work of updating the likely outcomes of investment and re-running the AppO analyses.

Also, you should be mindful that a decision engine, like AppO, can be used for a myriad of problems and can support every business decision. AppO licencing allows unlimited usage in the whole of the organisation and can thus improve decision making across the whole of your business.

We totally understand how you could consider universality (one Value Model to support the prioritisation of all investments within say a multi-national corporation, regardless of asset class or type) an impossibility. Up until a year ago we believed the same.

In late 2023 our founders and our CTO were conversing about possibilities, some people might call it a brainstorming session. The discussion centred on Thomas L. Saaty’s work. After some postulation and some research, we set about refining our approach during a month of “good old sweat and tears”, which gave us the basis to move towards universality. We have successfully extended Saaty’s work and enabled our belief that universality is now possible.

To that extent we have tested the hypothesis in our labs but it has not yet been proven in the “real world” because the journey to universality involves carefully maturing a complex Value Model within large and complex organisations, but we are progressing.

I any case, you may have heard of the 80/20 rule and being a pragmatic organisation maybe we’ll never achieve universality in the real world because many organisations will find the resources and time required to move from 80% to 100% to be impractical.