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Execution · Plan

Resource allocation review

Compares where money and people actually go against where the strategy says they should. The most common reason a good strategy produces nothing, and among the easiest to check.

The printable canvas and the handoff into Claude Code are part of a paid plan. See what a plan includes. It needs the Claude desktop app on this machine, and your team and the prompt library already installed in that project — we cannot see your disk, so open it there.

Stage
04 Plan
Works at
Corporate, Business
Maturity
Scaling → Large organisation
Time
Two to three days with the finance data

What it is

A comparison of where a business's money, people and management attention actually go against where its strategy says they should. Strategies are far more often defeated by unchanged budgets than by flawed analysis.

Actual allocation
Spend and headcount mapped to what they are trying to achieve, not to the cost centres they sit in. The re-cut is most of the work.
Management attention
Senior time by activity. Scarcer than cash, never measured, and frequently allocated in direct contradiction to the stated strategy.
Stated priorities
What the strategy says matters, in rank order.
The mismatch
The gap between the two rankings. This is the output — everything before it is preparation.
Inertia funding
Activity receiving money because it received money last year. Identified by asking what each line would get if funded from zero.
Reallocation decisions
Specific amounts moving from named sources to named destinations. Without amounts and sources this is an opinion.
The mistake people makeWhere there is no discretion over allocation — fixed contracts, regulatory minimums, sunk commitments — the constraint is the strategy, not the allocation. Establish how much is genuinely movable before starting.
What it’s forThe strategy is new but the budget still matches last year's strategy.
What it’s not forYou have no discretion over allocation. Then the constraint, not the allocation, is the strategy.

How you run it

  1. Map spend to strategic priorities, not to cost centresCost centre reporting hides strategy. Re-cut the numbers by what the money is trying to achieve, which usually takes a day and is the whole exercise.
  2. Include people, not just budgetManagement attention and senior time are scarcer than cash and are never tracked. Estimate them; the estimate will be revealing.
  3. Compare against the stated prioritiesRank strategic priorities and rank actual spend. The two lists are rarely in the same order, and the mismatch is the finding.
  4. Find what is funded by inertiaMost budgets are last year's plus a percentage. Ask what each significant line would receive if it were being funded from zero this year.
  5. Make specific reallocation decisionsWith amounts and sources. A review that concludes "we should invest more in the priority areas" has established nothing anyone did not know.

The prompt

Two ways to run it

Run this tool in your own Claude

The short prompt starts your partner against the library on your disk. The long one carries everything with it and needs nothing installed.

🔒 Prompt locked

Everything above is free — what this tool is, what it is for, what it is not for, and how to run it as a workshop. Three tool prompts a month are free with an account; beyond three, and for the printable canvas, it is the paid part.

See plans — from £19 a month

Your playbook

It lands in the earliest stage this tool suits. Move it on the Playbook page.

You’ll need

  • Actual spend and headcount by activity, not by cost centre
  • The strategy's stated priorities
  • Someone with the authority to move money

You’ll end up with

  • Current allocation mapped to strategic priorities
  • The gap between stated and actual priorities
  • Specific reallocation decisions with amounts

Runs well with

AI risk classification and governanceAlliance and partnership designAssumption logBackcasting