A Guardrails board helps you ensure your portfolio stays aligned with strategic constraints – like budget, risk appetite, or time horizon.

It’s not just about limits, it’s also about making thoughtful trade-offs visible, and enabling productive, high-stakes conversations.

One common example is the Lean Budget Guardrails model from the SaFE framework. Whether you use SaFE, another methodology, or your own, the concept of portfolio constraints is a powerful tool for improving decision-making and execution.

Boards are for conversations, not just observation. Portfoleon boards work best when they’re shared – with your team, your peers, your leadership. Use boards in meetings, invite others in.
Strategy isn’t something you “monitor” alone, it’s something you do together.

💬 Conversations to Have

The Guardrails board is an excellent canvas for:

• Quarterly budget and planning reviews
• Portfolio reprioritization sessions
• Conversations about adding or cutting projects

Here are some key questions to explore:

• 🚩 Are we doing enough for our long-term future?
  Do we have enough research, innovation, or risk-reduction work in flight?

• 🚩 Are we focused enough on short-term success?
  Are we delivering meaningful value to customers now – not just in the future?

• How much effort goes into “keeping the lights on”?
  Before discussing cuts or growth, it’s important to understand how much capacity is spent on maintenance and core operations.

⚠️ Watch out:
Horizons are not about when work happens – they’re about when the value is expected to materialize. A project done now may have its value delivered three years from now.

🚩 Example Difficult Conversation: Cost Savings

You’re a department head. Alice, a C-level executive, is exploring cost reductions – and considering reallocating people from your team to another department led by Bob.

The meeting is going to be hard. Alice needs to challenge how your people are allocated – and justify where cuts can be made.

Here’s how you prepare:

You build a Guardrails board that shows how your team’s initiatives map to different value horizons – short-, mid-, and long-term.

Instead of debating individual workloads (“what is John working on?”), you shift the focus to the intent of each initiative:

• What outcomes are we working toward?
• Which goals are we enabling in each time frame?
• If we cut here, what disappears – short-term wins or long-term bets?

With the board, the conversation becomes structured and strategic – not personal or chaotic.

It won’t make the conversation easy. But it will make it constructive.

🛠 How to Build This Board

To create a Guardrail board:

• Create a Horizon field Add a field to represent your initiatives’ horizon.

• Add a Pivot table board

  • Group lanes by Horizon

  • Filter the board (using the Filter button) by the date range you’re interested in.

  • Set the value to Sum of Demand FTE (or alternatively, define another metric that represents the scale of your initiative)

  • Set the visualization to Line chart.

That’s it – your board is ready for strategic conversation.