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Four Changes: How BBVA Generated Greater Strategic Value

By

Nils O Fonstad Jukka Salonen

Learning Objectives

  • Explain why BBVA’s annual portfolio management process was too rigid to support resilience in a fast-changing environment while still advancing long-term strategy.
  • Describe how BBVA piloted and scaled the Single Development Agenda to continuously reset strategic priorities, realign and rerank initiatives, and reallocate key resources—particularly talent—to the most impactful initiatives.
  • Analyze how the Single Development Agenda created a quarterly, evidence-based process for linking investments, initiatives, deliverables, strategic KPIs, and key resources.
  • Assess why allocating scarce talent—not just funding—became central to BBVA’s ability to accelerate high-priority initiatives and reduce resource bottlenecks.
  • Evaluate how transparency, common criteria, challenge sessions, Demo Days, and global program ownership helped BBVA make portfolio decisions fairer, more adaptive, and more strategically coherent.

Abstract

This case study describes how executives at Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria, S.A. (BBVA) created a dynamic evidence-based portfolio management process named the Single Development Agenda (SDA) to better align the company’s investments in digital innovation initiatives with its strategy. To accomplish this, executives changed four key aspects of portfolio management at BBVA to create a single investment model for the entire bank. In so doing, each quarter the executives were able to learn from more than two thousand initiatives and allocate talent to those with the most strategic promise. The SDA process helped the leaders of these initiatives obtain much-needed expertise, generate deliverables more efficiently, and contribute to the company’s strategic objectives. And it enabled top-level executives to realize the company’s strategy more effectively and with greater agility.

Appropriate for the Following Course(s)

IT investment and portfolio management, decision rights and governance, corporate strategy, performance measurement, and organizational agility

Read the case study

THERE IS NO TEACHING NOTE FOR THIS CASE STUDY.