Review — Templates

Money already spent gets no vote.

About these templates

The Review stage re-judges the live set, tracks benefits after delivery, stops work that no longer earns its place, and feeds learning back to strategy. Three templates: the value and benefits tracker, the stop-or-continue template, and the lessons log.

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F1 — Value and benefits tracker

Purpose: Follows each investment from funding through to benefit realisation, confirming whether the value that was claimed actually arrived — and feeding that evidence back into the reference framework and Direction.*

Part 1: In-flight value tracking

Review at each cadence. Updated values are the input to the re-prioritisation comparison.

Investment	Original value claim	Updated value estimate	Confidence	Cost-to-complete (updated)	Forward value summary	Change since last cycle	Action
[Name]	[Original claim from One-Pager]	[Current best estimate]	High / Med / Low	[£]	[Updated value] vs [cost to complete]	Increased / Stable / Decreased / Materially reduced	[Continue / Review / Escalate to stop-or-continue]

Part 2: Post-delivery benefit tracking

Created at go-live. Reviewed at the agreed benefit-realisation checkpoint(s) — typically 6 and 12 months after delivery.

Investment	Delivery date	Original benefit claim	Benefit measure	Checkpoint 1 date	Checkpoint 1 result	Checkpoint 2 date	Checkpoint 2 result	Realised?	Learning
[Name]	[Date]	[What was promised, in measurable terms]	[The metric used]	[Date]	[Actual vs expected]	[Date]	[Actual vs expected]	Yes / Partial / No	[What does this tell us about the criterion or assumption that justified it?]

Rules:

1. Every investment with a benefit claim requires a row in Part 2. The post-delivery tracker is created at the point of go-live — not retrospectively when someone asks whether the benefit arrived.
2. The checkpoint date is set at go-live, based on when the benefit is expected to materialise — not at the point of the review. A benefit expected to arrive twelve months after delivery has a checkpoint at twelve months.
3. “Realised: No” is not a failure of the tracker. It is a finding. The Learning column must be completed: what does this tell us about the investment criteria, the weights, or the assumptions the portfolio has been funding on?
4. Lessons from Part 2 feed the Direction re-weighting conversation. An investment type that consistently fails to realise its claimed benefit is evidence that its scoring is mis-calibrated.

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F2 — Stop-or-continue template

Purpose: A structured decision record for any investment that has been flagged for a stop-or-continue decision — whether triggered by the cadence, by a material change in forward value, or by a stop criterion being met.*

Field	Content
Investment name	[Name]
Trigger	Stop criterion met / Material change in forward value / Performance / Periodic review
Original stop criteria	[The specific criteria agreed at the funding stage — from the funding and commitment sheet]
Stop criteria met?	[Yes / No / Partially — specify which criteria and whether they are met]
Updated forward value	Value still to come: [£ or qualitative]. Cost still to spend: [£]
Alternative use of the money	What would the portfolio fund if this investment stops? [Name the candidates — this is the most important field]
Steer input	Summary of the portfolio-level health picture: dependencies, contention, blockers, escalations
Recommendation	Continue / Stop / Conditional continuation (with stated condition and review date)
Decision	Continue / Stop / Conditional
Decision maker	[Portfolio owner / Portfolio board / Governing board]
Date	[Date of decision]
Rationale	One paragraph: why this decision, on this basis
Communication plan	Who is informed, by whom, by when, and in what terms

Rules:

1. Every stop decision is recorded here. An investment that stops without a formal record has created an invisible precedent — visible only to anyone who later wonders why the investment disappeared.
2. The “alternative use of the money” field is mandatory. A stop decision that does not name what the money is reallocated to is a stop without the reallocation — which loses half its value.
3. The rationale must reference the forward value and the stop criteria, not the investment’s quality or the team’s effort. Stopping an investment is a portfolio decision, not a performance judgement.

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F3 — Lessons log

Purpose: A running record of what the portfolio has learned — from stopped investments, from benefit reviews, from Steer findings, and from the re-prioritisation process — that should inform the next Direction conversation.*

ID	Source	Date	Learning	Implication	Action	Status
[L001]	Stop decision / Benefits review / Steer / Re-prioritisation	[Date]	[What was learned: a specific finding, not a generalisation]	[What this implies for the reference framework, the weights, the risk appetite, or the bucket sizes]	[Update criterion definition / Re-weight / Adjust appetite / Change bucket / No action — accept as noise]	Open / Applied / Deferred

Rules:

1. A learning is only a learning if it is specific enough to act on. “We should be more careful with technology risk” is not a learning. “Three investments funded on the assumption that Platform X would scale to N users have failed on that assumption — we have over-weighted the value criterion relative to the technical-risk criterion for platform-dependent investments” is a learning.
2. Open learnings are reviewed at each Direction re-set. An open learning that has been sitting on the log for more than two periods without a decision on whether to act on it is a decision by default — and not the right one.
3. The log is the primary input to the portfolio’s feedback to strategy. It is not a report of activity; it is the portfolio’s honest account of what its choices revealed about the world.