Allovance solutions

Simplifying the decision making process.

Allovance helps solve complex business needs and common issues in one simple-to-use tool.

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Limited resources

Making the right decision with limited resources.

What is the ‘right’ decision? At Allovance, we define the right decisions as those that align most to your strategic priorities. In an ideal world, we would all have the money to do everything we want. In reality, we have limited resources (capital, time, labor) to complete all of our projects, initiatives, strategies, etc. and thus choose a portfolio that we think is ‘right’.

Based on extensive research in decision-making during his Ph.D., Sherif Farghal created a methodology that would allow users to create priorities (even subjective ones), quantify those priorities, then score projects against those priorities to determine their impact. This holistic approach to prioritization integrates principals from psychology and statistical analysis, removes biases from the process and allows subjective factors to be included in the decision-making process.

Allovance helps users be more purposeful in allocating their limited resources to the projects that will have the most positive impact on their strategic priorities or goals.

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Collaboration

Finding ways to create consensus among employees.

It’s daunting to have a project you’ve worked so hard on get rejected. Additionally, the feeling of having no voice or say into what projects get selected or implemented by your superiors is discouraging. These were two major factors and considerations as we created Allovance, a new way to prioritize and plan. Our built-in collaboration tools allows stakeholders, employees, community members, etc. to have a voice in the Prioritization and Planning process.

By incorporating many different roles in the process (the strategic team, experts, observers, project review team, project owners, and staff), stakeholders can see how their contributions affect the plan, and will feel like their voices are heard. Additionally, through the methodology and collaboration tools within Allovance, teams will be able to reach consensus on what priorities are important to the organization, how important these priorities are and how their individual and unit projects are aligned with those priorities.

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Capital Improvement Planning

Capital Planning just got a whole lot easier.

We understand the frustration of trying to create a multi-year capital improvement plan using various tools such as excel. Switching from software to software making conversions and trying to tie it all together in a comprehensive plan is often frustrating and time consuming. Allovance allows organizations to combine all of the functions of their various tools into one comprehensive Strategic Planning and Capital Allocation tool.

From setting your priorities to choosing strategies that align to your priorities and everything in between, we provide cities with a collaborative, visual and easy to use process to successfully create strategic & capital plans, but also justify their decisions and projects to the communities they serve, state and federal compliance agencies, and other stakeholders.

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Economic & Community Development

Turn community input into action.

Should you build a new athletic facility? Fix the potholes? What about a new high school? How do you compare things that are so different? Enter existing or potential project submissions into a project form so it can be considered against all other projects using the same standards of assessment. Each project will receive a Strategic Value score based on how closely it aligns to your priorities.

Allovance’s approach to collaboration and the project submission process opens the door to any number of community engagement opportunities.  Want to know how your community feels about the leadership’s stated priorities? Run a model for the community and compare scorecards. Want to consider community ideas as potential projects? Allow community members to input their own projects in custom project forms.

Allovance allows subjectivity to be included into the decision model. Now you can take apples, oranges, and bananas, and turn them all into apples for easy comparison.

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Dynamic Plans

The world is constantly changing. Your plans should too.

We’ve all been through this process before. You pay thousands (or hundreds of thousands) for a consultant to come help you create a strategic plan. What do you end up with? A 100-page static document that sits on a shelf and is seldom referenced. We understand the dynamic nature of decision making and strategic planning, and we think the software you use should be able to take that into account.

As priorities change, or new projects get added, you can easily adjust the plan to fit the dynamic nature of the organization. Additionally, our goal is to empower users within the organization to continue the process, so you don’t have to rely on consultants every time you want to make an adjustment.

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Transparency & Justification

Let the data do the talking.

Strategic Planning

When it comes to any modern organization, transparency and justification are vital to strategic planning and decision making. The link between the budget, the projects and strategies you implement, and organizational strategic priorities is missing in traditional strategic planning. With Allovance, you can visually see how projects connect to priorities to generate an impact on your organization. Additionally, you can now understand exactly how much money is being allocated to the different priorities. Through consensus building, priority-setting, quantifying, scoring, and including employees in the planning process, there is easy justification and transparency around why certain projects were selected and others were rejected.

Full model reporting and charts allow you to easily capture the outcomes and results of each step of the process and visually present it to relevant stakeholders.

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Urgency vs. Importance

Differentiate between Strategic Value, Urgency, and Complexity.

If your roof is on fire and is going to collapse, it is quite vital that you put out the fire and fix that roof. It is not strategically important to do this, as it will not make your organization the best organization in the world, but it is urgent because the need is immediate and the costs of not doing so are catastrophic. Is it Important? Or is it urgent? Criticality of time makes a project urgent, but not necessarily important.

Allovance measures each project on three lenses: Strategic Value (importance), Urgency, and Complexity. Many other tools and methodologies combine these three lenses into one overall score. At Allovance, each of these lenses can be considered separately (or together) when assessing a project.

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Structured Process

A structured, repeatable process that removes bias.

In our experience, we have found that many organization managers use a combination of multiple excel sheets (and maybe some simple planning tools) to prioritize their list of projects. Using excel comes with many challenges, including bias, errors, and the inability to easily change the prioritization process if things come up.

We’ve created a 5-step standardized process that is structured, repeatable, and dynamic enough to allow for real time changes. Having a structured process in place saves time and energy up front and lets you place more focus on the "what" and "why" of the decision rather than on the “how”.

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Strategic Alignment

Make the right decisions.

The end goal with any strategic plan is to align the projects with the goals. In other words, you want to make sure that the work you do on a daily basis impacts or aligns with the priorities or goals of the organization. That link between work and priorities is missing for many reasons such as:

  1. No communication between strategic team and other organizational members
  2. No tool to accurately measure the impact of work on priorities

These were major considerations in the creation of Allovance. By identifying and setting priorities during the first step of the process, we can eliminate the biases that come from selecting projects solely based on “expected ROI” or other financial criteria. Towards the end of the process, each project will be scored against all the priorities that were identified to come up with the project scores. Ultimately, you are able to see which priorities are impacted when you select a project (or portfolio of projects) and the extent of that impact both in terms of Strategic Value and Budget.

No department should be a silo. Each functional area should be able to link their work with the goals and priorities of the organization. Most current department planning activities and programs do not take this into account. Wouldn’t it be nice to compare multiple portfolios of projects in regards to their impact on organizational strategic priorities?

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Operationalization

Turn ideas into actions.

We’ve all done strategic planning before. Think back to the long document you created as part of the Strategic Planning Process. Where is that document now? Does your team still reference it? What happens if priorities change? We believe that a Strategic Plan should not be a static document given to you by consultants leaving you more confused than when you started.

We created Allovance with a goal: Follow these steps and you will make the right decisions. With a structured, repeatable, and dynamic process, your team will actually enjoy working on their Strategic Plan. The end result is a portfolio of projects or strategies that align with the priorities of the team/department/organization that can be adjusted as priorities change and planned into a Gantt chart for project management and multi-year planning.

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Consensus Building

Reach consensus faster, measure consistency, focus on what's important.

We understand that in many teams there will be many different opinions and priorities. We know how difficult it can be to try to “convince” someone why you feel your priority is more important. We’ve incorporated multiple visual tools within the software to help teams reach consensus faster and in a more productive way and to help teams easily understand how aligned they are on the priorities of the organization. Additionally, we’ve equipped our Decision Coaches with the facilitation techniques and tools needed to successfully facilitate priority-setting discussions. It doesn’t need to take tens of hours over the course of many meetings to come up with the priorities of the organization anymore. It’s no surprise that “failing to reach consensus” is listed as a top reason for why Strategic Plans often fail.
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Incorporating Subjectivity

Turn subjectivity into objectivity.

One big limitation of current prioritization software is that they do not allow for subjectivity to be considered as part of the prioritization process. Whether deciding who to hire, which projects to implement, which supplier to go with, or anything in between, we know that subjective factors can play a huge role in many of these decisions. Allovance allows users to create desirability scales so that subjective variables can be considered objectively when comparing project options.
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Elimination of Biases

No more politics. No more status quo. No more biases.

The process of allocation usually happens in a number of different ways. This may take the form of meetings where the loudest or most senior person in the room decides which projects to implement or excel sheets where each project is inconsistently ranked and then the projects with the highest ranks are implemented. Both of these methods introduce many decision-making biases, and also do not provide a structured, repeatable, dynamic process for project prioritization. Allovance helps identify and remove biases in the decision making process so that you can be sure you are proceeding on the path that is best for your organization.

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Environmental, Social, Governance

Add value to your scorecard by being able to score your values

What is ESG? It is short for values-based decision-making that considers Environmental, Social, and Governance factors. The idea is that these three factors are not only indicators of HOW an organization conducts its business, but also positively impact business returns as well. Allovance helps organizations include ESG principles as priorities in their capital allocation and include them as scorable items in project identification and selection.

Your decision engine

Allovance is a decision engine rooted in science, crafted around stakeholders, and built for clients like you.

Interested in learning more about how Allovance can help you?

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Discover the incredible power of the Allovance platform for your team.

Allovance is backed by over 20 years of decision making experience and data science methodologies – providing realtime decision making data with clarity and without bias.

Allovance Features

Real-world Allovance case studies.


Case Study

Allocating Public Sector IT Investments

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Transparently Allocating Funding to Initiatives Supporting the Mission – Local Development Finance Authority

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Case Study

Transparently Allocating Funding to Initiatives Supporting the Mission – Local Development Finance Authority

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Case Study

Transparently Allocating Funding to Initiatives Supporting the Mission – Local Development Finance Authority

Read Case Study

Case Study

Transparently Allocating Funding to Initiatives Supporting the Mission – Local Development Finance Authority

Read Case Study

Case Study

Transparently Allocating Funding to Initiatives Supporting the Mission – Local Development Finance Authority

Read Case Study

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