Participatory budgeting — financing in the 21st century

What does modern budgeting look like? In this article, Nadine and Romano show you how they coached a portfolio team and applied participatory budgeting at Zühlke to fund the initiatives of the company’s different value streams.

Insight in brief

• Zühlke has adopted the concept of participatory budgeting
• Greater innovation and collaboration thanks to workshops, coaching and SAFe methodology
• Results from the first attempt are positive

The mid-year preparations for Zühlke Switzerland’s various portfolios have come at a time of great uncertainty. Our plans and actions are still heavily affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. We now need to invest in the right areas and create stability, but also ensure that we don’t miss out on any new opportunities that come our way. One of these portfolios is ‘Fruitmix*.

For the ‘Fruitmix’ portfolio, the first half of the year was eventful, bringing many new enquiries and opportunities. But it also left us with limited time and resources to focus on bigger, strategic things. And the COVID restrictions meant that we couldn’t hold events, either. The overall picture differs depending on the strategic focus and the sector.

But the portfolio management team agrees on one thing: they need to move things up a gear in the second half of the year. The situation in a nutshell: the portfolio management team has set a budget of CHF 100,000* for the second half of the year. The 10 value streams — including some of the big ones, like the Banana value stream* and the Date value stream* — have not changed much in terms of content or structure, and they will remain in place for the second half of the year. The main priorities are the same, but the initiatives are new.

A lot of exciting initiatives have been put forward, and all of the value streams in the portfolio can look forward to new opportunities. There is talk of blue bananas*, new combinations of dates and berries*, and even experiments with frog fruit*. But ensuring they’re successful and not just different calls for smart investment decisions. This is precisely where the new method of participatory budgeting (PB) comes into play.

PB is a process within the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) and is applied at overarching portfolio level. This kind of portfolio is a good thing. It represents a particular section of a company, such as a unit or a division. In our case, this is the fruit*. The portfolio manages several value streams that drive certain solutions end-to-end, from concept to customer.

A value stream comprises all the people who contribute to the solution, all of the systems that are used, as well as the information flow and the required materials. In the first half of the year, the Banana value stream, for example, wrote a new white paper on future banana growth*, and the Date value stream* adapted the processes for its key deliverables.

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