Every PMO knows the meeting: fourteen projects, budget for eight, and a prioritisation conversation that runs on volume and seniority because nobody in the room shares the same picture of what the organisation is actually trying to do. Wardley Mapping exists for that moment. It is a way of drawing a map of your situation, from the user’s need down through everything that need depends on, so that strategy becomes an argument about a shared, challengeable picture rather than a contest of opinions. When there are too many projects and not enough resources, the map helps everyone frame and focus on what is important, which is why it has been spreading steadily from technology strategy into portfolio management.
Origins and history
Simon Wardley created the technique in 2005 at Fotango, the online photo service he ran, after concluding that most strategy he had been taught (and most he had written) was context-free imitation. He later serialised the whole method as a book, Wardley Maps, published as roughly nineteen chapters on Medium and given away under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY-SA 4.0), which is a large part of why the technique spread through technology firms and government. A citation note, because this model attracts sloppy references: there is no single authoritative ISBN. The canonical source is the Medium series itself; compiled editions exist, notably the LearnWardleyMapping.com edition assembled by Ben Mosior with Wardley’s blessing. His earlier public write-up, “An introduction to Wardley (Value Chain) Mapping” on his Bits or pieces? blog (2015), remains a readable way in.
The model explained
A Wardley Map has two axes and one rule of physics.
- The anchor and the value chain (vertical axis). Start from a named user and their need, never from your org chart. Below the need, draw every component it depends on, and everything those components depend on, arranged by visibility: things the user sees near the top, invisible plumbing at the bottom.
- The evolution axis (horizontal). Place each component by how evolved it is: genesis (novel, uncertain, hand-built), custom-built (understood by few, still bespoke), product (competing off-the-shelf options) and commodity (standardised, bought like electricity). Judge position by the component’s characteristics, honestly, however uncomfortable the answer.
- Movement. Competition drags everything rightwards over time. What is custom-built today becomes product, then commodity. A map is a forecast as much as a snapshot, because you can see what commoditises next and what that makes possible.
The practical force of the model for delivery organisations is that components at different evolution stages need different treatment. Genesis work suits experimentation, in-house build and tolerance of failure. Commodity work suits buying, consuming as a utility, and tight cost discipline. Forcing either through the other’s methods, or the other’s governance, is how organisations quietly waste enormous sums.
A small worked example makes the mechanics concrete. Anchor: a programme sponsor, whose need is confidence that delivery is on track. The chain beneath that need might run: a monthly portfolio report, fed by project status data, collected through a PPM tool, which depends on timesheet discipline and a resource model. Now place each component. Portfolio reporting itself is a commodity: every organisation does it, the formats barely differ, and nobody wins by reinventing it. Yet in many organisations the map will show that commodity being custom-built, lovingly, by hand, every month, while the resource model, which might genuinely differentiate how well the portfolio runs, sits neglected in genesis. One drawing, and the misallocation is visible to everyone in the room.
How to use it: the portfolio prioritisation workshop
This is where we find the model earns its keep for a PMO, and it is the use case we reach for when a portfolio has too many projects chasing too few people.
- Anchor first, and get agreement. Who is the user, and what do they need? Take the room back to this before anything else. Alignment on the anchor and the value chain is the foundation for everything that follows, and disagreement here, surfaced early, is the cheapest disagreement you will ever resolve.
- Draw the chain together. Keep it rough. A whiteboard or a printed canvas beats specialist tooling for a first session; practitioners consistently advise starting small and simple rather than losing the room to software.
- Place components on the evolution axis. Expect differences of view; surfacing and discussing them is the analysis. A capability someone insists is special, custom, “how we do things here” that the map says is a commodity is a finding, not a fight.
- Now overlay the portfolio. Take your live and proposed projects and ask of each: where does it touch the chain, and does it help or hinder? Ask it twice, once for the short term and once for the longer term, because the answers differ and both matter.
- Let the room decide the timing. A project might hinder the chain now for longer-term gain: a migration that degrades service for two quarters, a platform build that consumes the people your product teams want. The map does not make that call. It puts the trade-off where everyone can see it, and whether now is the right time for that project is for the people in the room to understand and decide, together, with the picture in front of them.
- Revisit. Everything on the map keeps moving rightwards without asking permission. Re-map when conditions shift, and expect maps to be most valuable in fast-moving environments, which recent practitioner writing confirms is exactly where they shine.
We have built the workshop canvas as a free PowerPoint pack: the mapping canvas, a completed example map, and facilitation notes for the session above. Keep the map itself about components; the portfolio overlay works best as a conversation around it.
>> Download the Wardley Mapping PowerPoint <<
When the PMO should use this
Three uses stand out beyond the prioritisation workshop. First, build versus buy versus outsource challenge. Anything a business case proposes to custom-build that the map places in commodity is a conversation the PMO is uniquely positioned to start, and the map lets you start it with evidence rather than opinion. The reverse is also true: genesis work presented with confident two-decimal-place estimates is a risk conversation waiting to happen.
Second, governance that fits the work. Most PMOs inherit one gating regime applied to everything. The evolution axis explains precisely why that hurts: genesis needs cheap, fast iteration; commodity needs rigorous cost and service discipline; product-stage work sits between. Segmenting governance, reporting cadence and method guidance by evolution stage is a defensible, explainable alternative to one-size-fits-all, and it pairs naturally with the Cynefin framework, which makes the same argument from the nature of the problem rather than the evolution of the component.
Third, duplication spotting. Map several programmes’ value chains on one canvas and you will find the same commodity capability being custom-built twice, which is a classic portfolio finding no RAG report will ever surface. We have seen versions of this across sectors from finance to telecoms; the map makes visible what the reporting hides.
Criticism and limitations
Mapping has a real learning curve, and first maps are usually bad maps; that is normal and does not matter, because the conversation while drawing is where the value starts. All maps are wrong in detail, and evolution placement is a judgement rather than a measurement, so treat positions as claims to be challenged rather than facts. The technique is weak where problems need fine-grained, quantitative analysis; recent practitioner writing is candid that it zooms out well and zooms in badly. And it is a senior-audience tool: a map workshop with people who cannot change the portfolio produces a nice diagram and nothing else. Wardley built the method partly as an antidote to context-free tools such as SWOT analysis, and the comparison is instructive: SWOT lists opinions, a map situates them. Once a direction is chosen, OKRs are the natural way to turn it into measurable commitments.
How HotPMO can help
If your prioritisation meetings run on volume rather than shared context, or your governance treats a genesis experiment and a commodity migration identically, those are symptoms worth taking seriously. Our PMO Assessment (the SPACE Audit) examines exactly this: whether your PMO can see its portfolio clearly and whether its methods fit what it sees. We embed alongside teams to fix what the assessment finds, and as an ISO 9001 certified consultancy we bring the same situational honesty to our own work.
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Further reading
- Wardley, S. Wardley Maps, serialised book, Medium (wardleymaps publication), CC BY-SA 4.0. Chapter 1, “On being lost”: https://medium.com/wardleymaps/on-being-lost-2ef5f05eb1ec
- Wardley, S. (2015). “An introduction to Wardley (Value Chain) Mapping”. Bits or pieces?, 2 February 2015. https://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/02/an-introduction-to-wardley-value-chain.html
- Larson, W. (2025). “Refining strategy with Wardley Mapping”. Irrational Exuberance, 2 January 2025. https://lethain.com/wardley-mapping/