From Boardroom to Backlog: Delivering Strategy at Speed in Lean Times

How CIOs and Transformation Leaders Can Align Strategic Priorities With Execution Using Connected Data, Not Hope

July 18, 2025

Author: Mike Lentini

In volatile markets, the cost of misalignment skyrockets. The gap between strategy and execution becomes a liability, slowing down delivery, draining budgets, and blindsiding leaders with outcomes that don’t match intent.

And yet, teams in many organizations still treat strategy as a separate conversation from delivery. Strategic plans live in slide decks. Execution lives in Jira boards, spreadsheets, and disconnected status meetings. What’s missing in the middle is alignment, not just agreement on goals, but real-time connection between priorities, funding, and the work teams are doing on the ground.

This kind of alignment shows up in three critical ways:

• Strategic alignment: Everyone knows what they’re trying to achieve and why it matters right now.
• Operational alignment: Teams are working on the right things, with visibility into progress, risk, and capacity.
• Decision-making alignment: Leaders can quickly shift priorities when the market changes, with confidence and coordination.
  In a downturn, alignment isn’t a buzzword. It’s your competitive edge.

The real cost of the strategy-execution gap

It’s easy to assume that if everyone’s working hard, the right things must be getting done. But without visibility and alignment, you’re exposed to these risks:

• Funding work that’s no longer aligned with top business priorities.
• Teams spending cycles on tasks that look productive but aren’t impactful.
• Delayed pivots because leadership doesn’t see problems until it’s too late.
• Wasted capacity tied up in low-value or duplicative efforts.

Executives feel this most acutely when business outcomes lag, even though sprints are being completed on time.

Insight: Research from Harvard Business Review shows that while most leaders cite strategy execution as a top priority, only a small fraction actually succeed in doing it effectively. Why? Because they’re managing strategy in PowerPoint and execution in silos.

Why value streams beat project plans

Traditional project-based funding and planning models just don’t keep up with change. By the time a project is approved, scoped, and staffed, the business case may already be outdated. In lean times, that inefficiency isn’t just painful; it’s unsustainable.

Enter value streams.

When you align teams, funding, and outcomes around value streams, you create a system that’s designed to offer these advantages:

• Continuously adjust to market shifts.
• Prioritize the most important work, not just the most visible project or the demand of the executive who asks the loudest.
• Focus on delivering outcomes instead of checking boxes

Most importantly, you create a direct line of sight from the boardroom to the backlog, so what you say matters is actually what shows up in delivery.

Making strategy move: Three practical levers

To close the gap and build execution discipline into your organization, you need more than Agile teams and OKRs. You need systems that keep strategy alive and actionable.

Here’s where to start:

1. Lean portfolio management (LPM) for dynamic prioritization

Ditch the annual plan that becomes obsolete by Q2. Instead, continuously fund and prioritize based on real-time business impact. LPM practices let you shift resources without losing momentum.

2. Outcome-based metrics, not activity reports

Track what changes because of the work, not just whether the work got done. Think customer adoption, time to value, and cost avoidance—not just velocity and burnup charts.

3. Enterprise-wide visibility and context

Give leaders a real-time view into work, capacity, and progress across teams, portfolios, and value streams. Transparency empowers better decisions, faster course-correction, and fewer surprises.

ValueOps: The missing link between strategy and delivery

The above efforts are precisely where ValueOps shines. Here’s how the solution helps:

• Rally enables Agile teams to align with portfolio-level goals by connecting user stories to strategic initiatives in one unified view.
• Clarity adds the top-down layer, enabling teams to employ LPM practices, fund by value stream, and track delivery in the context of business strategy.
• Together, these offerings give you continuous alignment. You get visibility into what’s happening now, insight into what’s coming, and confidence that your teams are working on what matters most.

You move faster, but with focus. You invest with intention. You deliver with purpose.

Real-world proof: A Fortune 100 financial services firm used ValueOps to cut low-impact initiatives by 23% and reinvest in customer-facing innovation, without increasing headcount or budget.

Alignment is your competitive advantage

In lean times, the companies that win aren’t just the ones that do more with less. They’re the ones who stop doing what doesn’t matter.

Bridging the boardroom-to-backlog gap isn’t just an Agile best practice. It’s a business imperative. And with ValueOps, it’s entirely achievable.

Ready to connect strategy to execution—and make every initiative count? Contact the ValueOps by Broadcom team today.