HR Shared Agenda

The Problem

Nike Global HR was running more than twenty programs at once, and no leader could set any two of them side by side. Five strategic priorities, every brand, every region, every employee population, and still the basic questions stayed hard to answer: what is each one for, who does it serve, what does it depend on, and when does it land. The answers all existed, scattered across decks, spreadsheets, and the people who ran each program. The portfolio just was not legible.

The Work

The fix was not more reporting. Every program already described itself, just in its own deck and its own format, which is exactly why the portfolio would not resolve into anything you could compare. So I looked at what every one of those decks was quietly trying to answer, distilled it down to a handful of shared questions, and built the one shape they could all fit: a single page that asks every program those same questions, in the same order. Its intended result, who it serves as a matrix across brands, populations, roles, and geographies, what it relies on and connects to, and how it paces across the year. Relevance to each strategic priority is a fill-count meter, where the number of filled blocks carries the signal, so every leader in the room reads the same rating whether or not they can tell the colors apart.

The priorities themselves were the organization's. The five Centers of Gravity and the annual Maxims came from Nike HR leadership; what I designed was the common language that made every program answer to them the same way, so a set of unlike programs could finally be lined up and compared.

I built it in two forms: a printed InDesign book, with a cover and a how-to-read guide, for the review room where the portfolio actually got debated; and a clickable interactive version, so the same portfolio could be filtered, opened, and read one program at a time.

The interactive build

The printed book was made for the review room, but a book cannot be filtered and it cannot be drilled into. That is why the version at the top of this page exists: a working Axure RP prototype of the FY18 Global Shared Agenda, four iterations deep, that turned the one-page template into something a leader could operate.

The home screen is a filterable browser holding the full portfolio, every one of those twenty-plus programs on the same page shape. You narrow it by Center of Gravity (the five strategic priorities), by Center of Excellence (the function that owns the work), or by pace: Take the Lead, Keep Pace, or Hold Back. Results come back as one row per initiative: its name, the priority it sits under, a one-line description, and a center-of-excellence tag that is labeled, not just colored. Pace, which a dashboard would usually show as a red-to-green light, is instead three runners, so the rating reads whether or not you can tell the colors apart.

Open any initiative and you land on its single page: what it is trying to change, who exactly it serves, what it depends on, and when it lands. It is the same template as the printed book, made live and navigable, down to the fill-count relevance meters, the cost-estimate table, and the multi-year delivery timeline.

Every cost figure here is redacted on purpose. What is worth showing is the template and the interaction, not Nike's internal numbers.

Impact

One page, the same page every time, is what let a leader stop asking what a program was and start asking whether it was the right bet, one to keep, one to pace, or one to stop. That was the whole point: not more reporting, but a portfolio laid out so every program could be read on the same terms and weighed against the rest.

I cannot point to a specific funding decision it changed; by the following year, reorgs and shifting priorities had blurred any clean before-and-after. What is certain is more basic. The portfolio stopped being a stack of separate stories and became one comparable set, which is where any real allocation call has to start.

Taking scattered, mismatched information and making it comparable enough to decide on is the same problem I work on now at Calafai.