Building Capability

Chapter 5: Finding the Highest Value Entry Point

Before you read — by the end of this chapter you will understand:

• How to audit an organisation’s opportunities without getting overwhelmed
• The four questions that cut through competing priorities
• How to identify the highest value, lowest cost entry point for your first build
• Why the first proof of value is a door, not a destination

Once you’ve done the thinking in chapters three and four — once you’ve mapped what you have, looked at all three horizons, and got the full picture in view — you face a practical problem.

There are too many options.

Most organisations, when they properly audit their opportunity landscape for the first time, find themselves looking at a list of twenty, thirty, sometimes fifty things that could be built, improved, or systematised. Every department has a pain point. Every senior person has a pet project. Finance wants better reporting. Operations wants a workflow tool. Sales wants a CRM integration. The CEO wants a client-facing portal.

They’re all legitimate. They’re probably all worth doing. But you can only start one place. And where you start shapes everything that follows.

So the question is: how do you choose?

Four Questions That Cut Through Everything

I’ve sat through a lot of prioritisation exercises in my time. They tend to go one of two ways.

The first way: the most senior person in the room — or the person with the most political capital — drives the decision toward whatever their department needs. This is usually framed as “strategic alignment.” It’s actually just organisational politics. And it frequently produces a first phase that’s hard to justify, harder to build, and generates almost no visible return.

The second way: the team builds a matrix. They score everything on impact, feasibility, cost, time, strategic alignment, risk, and four other factors they’ve added to make themselves feel rigorous. They end up with a spreadsheet that scores every option within two points of every other option and tells them nothing useful.

I use four questions instead — in two paired sets.

The first pair is about value. They’re the questions that cut through the noise and identify where the real return is.

Question one: Where is the highest value for the customer?

By “customer” I mean whoever experiences the output of this process — whether that’s an external client, an internal team, or both. What would genuinely change their experience of working with this organisation if it were different? What’s the thing they notice, complain about, or work around most often?

Question two: Where is the highest value for the business?

This is different from the first question. It’s asking where the biggest operational return is. Where is time being consumed that shouldn’t be? Where is revenue being lost or left on the table? Where are errors or delays creating cost that a well-designed system would eliminate?

The starting point you’re looking for is where the answers to both questions overlap. The place that’s high value for the customer and high value for the business. That’s where you’ll usually find the best proof of value — the thing that, when it’s built and working, everyone can see clearly was worth doing.

The second pair is about strategic positioning. Once you have a shortlist of high-value options, these questions help you choose the one worth starting with.

Question three: Which entry point starts to differentiate us from competitors?

Not every first phase does this. Some proofs of value are purely internal — they save time, reduce errors, free up capacity. Completely legitimate. Worth doing. But they do not change your competitive position. A competitor who builds the same thing is back alongside you.

The entry points worth prioritising — all else being equal — are the ones that begin to express something specific about how your organisation operates. Something that reflects your particular knowledge of your customers, your market, your process. Something that a generic competitor could not simply copy by purchasing the same platform.

Lilydale Books could have started with generic inventory software. It would have been faster and cheaper. But it would not have produced the parent-facing portal that understood how Victorian school booklists actually worked — the specific mix of subjects, the per-child requirements, the payment timing, the school-specific forms. That specificity came from thirty years of accumulated knowledge that Ayesha’s family had built. The generic software would have made the back office slightly tidier. The bespoke system, built on that specific knowledge, made the business genuinely harder to compete with.

Question four: Which entry point creates the foundation for what comes next?

This is the inward-facing partner to question three. Where question three looks outward — how does this change where we sit relative to competitors — question four looks inward: how does this change what becomes possible inside the organisation?

Not every first build opens doors. Some do their job and stop there. But the best entry points are ones where the act of building creates a platform, a data layer, or an architectural foundation that every subsequent phase can build on.

When News Ltd embarked on their digital twin — a real-time operational model of their newspaper production — it wasn’t just a better reporting tool. Building it, and then automating the process of keeping it populated, created a live, accurate picture of the entire operation that had never existed before. Once that foundation was in place, every department could see their own processes reflected in it. Every subsequent build — whether in production scheduling, distribution, or editorial planning — had a shared platform to connect to. The first build didn’t just solve a problem. It made the next ten builds faster, cheaper, and more joined-up than they could have been otherwise.

That’s what question four is looking for: the entry point that, when built well, multiplies the value of everything that follows.

Questions three and four often point to the same answer. When they do, you have strong confirmation you’ve found the right place to start. When they point in different directions, that tension is worth examining — it usually means there’s a trade-off between immediate competitive positioning and longer-term internal leverage.

A Practical Filter: What’s the Cost of Getting There?

These four questions tell you where the value is. But value alone doesn’t tell you where to start. You also need a realistic view of what it costs — in time, money, and organisational capacity — to get there.

A high-value opportunity that requires twelve months of development and deep integration with three legacy systems is a very different kind of first step than a high-value opportunity that can be meaningfully addressed in eight weeks with a focused build. Both might be worth doing. But as a first step, one is an investment with a long runway before it returns anything; the other is a proof of value that starts generating return — and building organisational confidence — much sooner.

I look for the opportunity that sits at the intersection of: high value on all four questions and achievable in a sensible first phase.

Not the easiest thing to build. The highest value thing that can be built first, within reasonable constraints.

That’s the entry point.

The Draeger Case Study

Let me share a real example — one that I think illustrates this well.

I worked with Draeger, whose Australian operations coordinate service teams across the continent, maintaining both mining and medical equipment. In their world, downtime is not just an operational inconvenience — it can mean life-or-death situations. When critical equipment fails on a mining site or in a hospital, the clock starts immediately.

When we mapped the full opportunity landscape, the list was long. There were obvious improvements available in scheduling, in reporting, in back-office coordination. There was a data problem — technician records, equipment histories, and job statuses lived in disconnected systems that required manual reconciliation.

But when we applied the first pair of questions — highest value for the customer, highest value for the business — the answer that emerged was clear, and it wasn’t any of the obvious back-office ones.

It was the emergency coordination process.

When a breakdown call came in, the coordination team was making ten phone calls to find who was available, closest to site, and qualified for the specific equipment. Technicians were being interrupted mid-job to answer enquiries about potential reassignments. Updates happened manually, creating delays and confusion about job status. In high-pressure situations where every minute matters, the coordination overhead was creating unnecessary stress for everyone — and eroding customer confidence in response times.

The highest value for the customer was faster, clearer emergency response. The highest value for the business was removing the manual coordination burden that consumed staff time and introduced errors. Both pointed to the same place.

Applying the second pair of questions confirmed the choice. A purpose-built coordination tool would express something specific about how Draeger operated — the particular complexity of their equipment types, their technician specialisations, the geography of Australian operations. That’s not something a competitor could replicate with off-the-shelf software. And building the coordination layer first created a real-time operational picture that subsequent builds — scheduling optimisation, predictive maintenance, equipment history — could all connect to.

Building a purpose-built coordination tool that matched the right technician to urgent breakdowns automatically — with real-time visibility and mobile access — was the right door to open first. Every other item on the list was valuable. But this was the one where getting it right made the biggest difference to the people who mattered most: the customers in an emergency, and the technicians in the field.

Everything else on the list had to wait. That took discipline. But it was right.

Why the First Step Is a Door, Not a Destination

I want to make one thing clear, because I see this misunderstood often.

The purpose of the first phase of a capability build is not to solve the biggest problem. It’s to prove the value of the approach — to demonstrate, with something real and working, that investing in this direction is worth continuing.

That’s different from trying to do everything in phase one. It’s also different from doing the cheapest or easiest thing just to say you’ve started.

The first phase should be substantial enough to produce a genuine result — something the organisation can feel, measure, and point to. A real improvement in a real process for real people. But it should also be scoped tightly enough to be delivered in a reasonable timeframe, within a manageable budget, without requiring the organisation to completely restructure how it operates.

I think of it as opening a door. The door leads somewhere worth going. What’s through it is valuable. But the door is not the whole journey — it’s the beginning of it.

When that first phase goes well, something important happens. Not just operationally. The organisation’s appetite for the work changes. People who were sceptical start to see what’s possible. The internal conversation shifts from “is this worth doing?” to “what do we do next?” That change in organisational posture is itself one of the most valuable outputs of the first phase.

What the Audit Actually Looks Like

Auditing the opportunities doesn’t need to be an exhaustive, months-long process.

It needs to be wide enough to see all the real options, and focused enough to be useful. In practice, that means getting every department or function in the same room — or at least the same conversation — and giving each one the chance to surface what they’re working with, what’s painful, and what they wish they had.

When you’re having that conversation, listen for:

• Where the same problem appears in multiple contexts (usually a sign it’s systemic, not local)
• Where a single change would have disproportionate knock-on effects downstream
• Where the workarounds are most elaborate (usually a sign of the most significant underlying gap)
• Where the people closest to the customer experience the most friction

By the end of that conversation, the picture is rarely ambiguous. The right entry point tends to be fairly obvious once you’ve looked at the whole landscape — which is exactly why looking at the whole landscape first matters so much.

The discipline is not in the analysis. It’s in resisting the temptation to start somewhere easier just because the right place requires a bit more thought.

Start right. And once you know where to start, the next question is: what does success actually look like? That’s what the next chapter is about.

Tool: The Entry Point Prioritiser (Quick Version)

Use this to apply the four questions and the practical filter to your list of candidates. You don’t need twenty options — five to eight is plenty for a first pass.

Allow 60 minutes. Include someone who knows commercial priorities and someone who knows operational reality.

Step 1: List your candidates
Write down the five to eight opportunities you’re considering for a first build.

Step 2: Score each on the four questions
For each candidate, give a quick score from 1 (low) to 5 (high). Don’t overthink it — your instinct is usually right.

Step 3: Apply the practical filter to your top two or three
For each high-scoring option:

• Realistic development time for a meaningful first phase:
• Estimated cost:
• Organisational capacity required (team involvement, disruption):
• Any dependencies or integration complexity that would extend the timeline:

Step 4: Choose
The right entry point scores well on all four questions and passes the filter. If your highest scorer is also the hardest to build, that tension is worth examining before committing.

My entry point is:

What success looks like at the end of this first phase:

Want to go deeper?
The full version of this tool — the Entry Point Prioritiser — includes a scoring matrix for up to fifteen opportunities, a facilitated prioritisation workshop guide, and worked examples from real organisations using all four questions.
Available in the members area at [website]