What we solve ·Where do I put the budget?
Vanguard · Guide
What is actually working in your industry and what is noise?
They bring us ideas from other industries and ours does not work the same way.
Your sector's candidates ordered by return and by risk, with the ones to drop and why.
Sector prioritizationSend this page to whoever decides
This sounds like you if
- The assessments people bring you talk about companies that look nothing like yours.
- The industry body announced something and you were asked in committee what you are going to do.
- There is approved budget and a list of sector ideas still unordered.
Use this today, without hiring anyone
The three risks that change the order of the list depending on the sector. Run yours over the candidates you have today and you will move the ranking on your own.
- If you are in health or health insurance: order by consequence for the person, not by return. A candidate that touches access to a service or to coverage moves to the top of the risk list even if its return is modest.
- If you are in banking or finance: ask of every candidate whether you could reconstruct one specific decision for a supervisor in under an hour. Whatever does not pass that test is not ready, however good the case is.
- If you are in retail or general insurance: check data quality before the model. In these sectors commercial data tends to be biased by how it was captured, and a candidate that leans on it inherits the whole bias.
One test works everywhere. A candidate that trips over three of the five classic obstacles, which are data quality, integration cost, team resistance, absence of internal judgment and lack of an owner, does not enter the ranking even if its return is the highest on the list.
How we solve it
The method, not the promise.
- The sector's value chain gets mapped onto your specific organization, not onto the sector in the abstract.
- The candidates already circulating internally and the ones the industry body is announcing outside get inventoried.
- Each one gets tested against what your operation can sustain six months after starting.
- The risks specific to the sector get named candidate by candidate, which is where the order changes.
- The ranking gets delivered with its written criteria and, above all, the list of exclusions with their reason.
What you receive
- The map of the sector's value chain applied to your organization.
- The prioritized ranking with written, reproducible criteria.
- The list of exclusions with their reason, which is usually the most useful part.
- The ninety day plan with the first candidate described at the level at which it can be contracted.
The proof that applies here
- 19 years inside regulated financial institutions, eight of them without a single audit finding.
- 250,000 incidents ordered by return and by risk with the same method, on an operation of our own.
- Portfolio prioritization under budget constraint across eleven countries, with the list of exclusions written.
Before you hire
The firm contributes operating and decision judgment; the regulatory interpretation specific to your industry is contributed by a specialist and signed by your lawyer.
The prioritization gets done with your sector's volumes and failure points, not with another's. The method is the same one that ordered 250,000 incidents by return and by risk; the data is yours. When regulatory interpretation specific to the industry is needed, a specialist gets brought in or the scope gets bounded in writing, before starting.
Of the candidates on your table, which one moves up or down if you order them by risk instead of by return?