Too Many Projects, Too Little Strategy? Time for a Portfolio Mindset
By Incountr
TL;DR (for busy leaders)
If your org is juggling dozens of initiatives, you’re not “agile”—you’re unfocused.
A portfolio mindset aligns investments to strategy, balances risk and return, and kills “zombie” work fast.
Run regular portfolio reviews: align leaders, analyze the portfolio for insights, and make decisive stop/START/accelerate calls.
Shift from projects funded annually to value streams funded continuously with lean guardrails and outcome KPIs.
The Real Problem: Project Overload Is a Strategy Tax
Most organizations don’t suffer from too little effort—they suffer from too many initiatives that don’t ladder up to strategy. Leaders keep adding priorities, but few sunset old ones. The result: diluted focus, slow execution, talent burnout, and value leakage. Recent management guidance underscores a simple truth: the path to impact starts by doing fewer, better, and more aligned things.
Tell-tale symptoms of overload:
Teams running 120% utilization (or more) to “fit it all in”
Key initiatives without clear owners, metrics, or decision rights
Roadmaps full of outputs (features, releases) instead of outcomes (OKRs, KPIs)
“Pet projects” shielded by sponsorship but starved of evidence
Escalations around dependencies, funding, and staffing every quarter
If any of these feel familiar, it’s time to replace project sprawl with a portfolio mindset.
What Is a Portfolio Mindset?
A portfolio mindset treats your change efforts like an investor treats capital:
Strategic alignment: Every initiative exists to advance a clear, measurable strategic priority.
Balance: Mix near-term “no-regrets” moves with options and bold bets.
Throughput of value: Optimize scarce capacity for the highest return, not the loudest request.
Adaptation: Rebalance as evidence arrives; fund what works, stop what doesn’t.
In practice, that means adopting Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) to connect strategy and execution with lean funding, cadence-based governance, and outcome measures.
Why Leaders Need It Now
Two forces make portfolio thinking non-negotiable:
Capital and capacity constraints — the cost of capital and talent scarcity demand sharper choices and faster reallocation.
Faster tech cycles — digital and AI accelerate learning loops; you need a way to place multiple bounded bets, measure, and pivot on evidence, not hope.
The Business Case: Fewer, Better, Aligned
High-performing organizations narrow priorities, define outcomes, and align resources accordingly. Strategy execution research shows priorities must link to a vivid vision, identify critical vulnerabilities, and concentrate on what matters most—simple, communicable guardrails that drive coherent action.
When leaders regularly review their innovation and change portfolio, they often discover significant spend that can be freed by stopping subscale, misaligned, or slow-moving “zombie” efforts and redirecting investment to higher-impact bets.
From Projects to Portfolio: Core Principles
Start with strategy. Tie the portfolio to explicit strategic themes and a small set of outcome goals (OKRs).
Fund value streams, not one-off projects. Shift budgeting from annual project approvals to continuous, guardrail-based funding of durable teams.
Make work visible. Maintain a single, authoritative view of initiatives, owners, spend, stage, and outcomes.
Balance the mix. Use risk/return horizons (core/adjacent/transformational) and time to value to balance the portfolio.
Measure outcomes, not output. Define value hypotheses and KPIs per initiative; reevaluate on a 90- to 180-day cadence.
Practice decisive governance. Establish entry/exit criteria and kill or pivot work quickly when evidence falls short.
A Practical Framework: Run a Strategic Portfolio Review (Quarterly).
Cadence: At least quarterly; more often in volatile conditions.
Participants: CEO/COO/CFO/CIO, business unit leads, product/PMO leaders, architecture/ops as needed.
Three steps (fast, fact-based):
Align leaders on purpose and rules of the road
Why are we meeting? (e.g., close a growth gap; rebalance risk)
What “good” looks like: target mix by horizon, themes, ROI/ROIC guardrails
Decision rules: stop/continue/accelerate/start; evidence thresholds
Analyze the portfolio for insights
Build a few high-signal portfolio views:Strategic alignment map: initiatives by strategic theme and investment share
Time-to-value vs. addressable value bubble chart: exposes subscale and late bets
Pipeline velocity: identifies “zombies” stuck pre-value
Capacity allocation: who’s working on what vs. priority
Risk heatmap: tech, change, compliance, vendor
Make decisions
STOP/PAUSE: misaligned, subscale, zombie work
ACCELERATE: top-quartile outcome velocity or strategic leverage
START: fill gaps against strategy or rebalance horizons
REBALANCE: people, budget, vendors, sequencing
Tip: Keep the data “80/20,” or decisions stall. Then publish a one-page portfolio decision log with rationale, KPIs, and owners.
How Lean Portfolio Management Makes It Stick
LPM operating model (what changes day-to-day):
Strategy alignment review (quarterly): Validate that funded work maps to strategic themes and OKRs.
Portfolio budget review (quarterly): Adjust guardrail budgets across value streams based on evidence.
Roadmap and financial reviews (monthly): Track spend vs. outcomes; update sequencing.
Investment council (weekly): Time-box experiments, approve small bets, and kill under-performers quickly.
Retrospectives (quarterly): Improve governance flow, decision latency, and signal quality.
What’s different from traditional PPM
From outputs → outcomes: Measure impact (customer, financial, risk) rather than feature counts.
From annual capex → rolling bets: Smaller, time-boxed funding tranches tied to evidence.
From project teams → long-lived teams: Stable teams compound domain knowledge and delivery speed.
Roles & Responsibilities: Who Does What
CEO/Exec team: Set (and stick to) few strategic themes; sponsor tough kill decisions; protect capacity for change.
CFO/Finance: Implement guardrail budgets; shift to evidence-based reallocation using ROIC/NPV and option value where appropriate.
CIO/CTO/Product leaders: Define value streams, outcome KPIs, architectural guardrails; ensure visibility and flow.
PMO/EPMO: Evolve from schedule police to strategic partner—curate the portfolio, standardize metrics, run the review cadence, and enable decision transparency.
Change & HR: Plan capacity for change, role transitions, and incentives aligned to outcomes.
Metrics That Matter (and the traps to avoid)
Portfolio-level KPIs
Strategic alignment index: % spend aligned to top 3 themes
Outcome velocity: % initiatives tracking to value hypothesis at each review
Time to first value: median time from funding to measured impact
Reallocation rate: % budget/headcount moved quarter-to-quarter
Risk balance: mix across core/adjacent/transformational horizons
Initiative-level KPIs
Leading indicators tied to the value hypothesis (e.g., activation, cycle time, conversion, NPS, cost-to-serve), not just delivery milestones.
Avoid these traps
Output vanity: Shipping features ≠ creating value
Confirmation bias: Extending runway for weak ideas without new evidence
Budget inertia: “Use it or lose it” encourages waste; move to rolling, guardrail-based funding
How to Kill “Zombie” Projects (Without Killing Morale)
Borrow these practices from organizations that successfully rebalance:
Pre-commit to exit criteria: Time-boxed targets for adoption, margin, risk reduction, or technical feasibility
Require a current value hypothesis: If the hypothesis is stale, the work is too
Make the opportunity cost visible: What higher-value work is starved because this lives on?
Normalize stopping: Celebrate reclaimed capacity; redeploy top talent fast
Evidence-driven reviews commonly surface large pools of spend tied to misaligned or subscale bets—capacity you can redirect to strategic moves.
How Many Initiatives Is “Too Many”?
A useful rule of thumb: if leadership can’t clearly articulate each initiative’s strategic thesis and outcome metric in one breath, you’re carrying too much. Recent guidance urges organizations to focus on fewer, more consequential initiatives, and to make the hard trade-offs to stop the rest.
Putting It Into Practice: A 30-60-90 Day Plan
Days 1–30: Get a clear picture
Build a single source of truth: list all change initiatives with owner, theme, stage, spend, and headline KPI
Tag each by strategic theme and horizon (core/adjacent/transformational)
Draft initial portfolio views (alignment map, time-to-value vs. addressable value, velocity)
Days 31–60: Run the first decisive review
Agree decision rules: what stops, what accelerates, what starts (and why)
Set guardrail budgets by value stream; move from project funding to team-based funding
Convert output milestones to outcome KPIs and create an evidence calendar (what will we learn by when?)
Days 61–90: Institutionalize LPM
Lock in the cadence (quarterly alignment/budget; monthly roadmap/financial; weekly investment council)
Publish a portfolio decision log and a transparent KPI dashboard
Launch retrospectives to improve cycle time, decision latency, and signal quality
Advanced Moves (When You’re Ready)
Programmatic M&A for portfolio rotation: Use small, frequent deals to shift toward higher-momentum spaces while maintaining integration quality and ROIC discipline. McKinsey & Company
Guardrail-based finance: Replace line-item controls with tracked guardrails (run-rate, innovation %, cost-to-serve, ROI thresholds) and faster reallocations. Atlassian
Dual-track horizons: Balance quick wins with options (e.g., AI proofs that graduate only on evidence) to keep strategy resilient. CIO
FAQs Leaders Ask
“Won’t fewer projects slow us down?”
No. Spreading teams thin creates queues and rework. Focusing capacity increases throughput of value and shortens time-to-impact.
“How do we prevent everything from becoming a priority again?”
Publish 3–5 strategic themes, connect funding and KPIs to them, and make exceptions rare and time-boxed.
“What if a sponsor won’t let their project die?”
Use pre-agreed exit criteria, show the opportunity cost in portfolio views, and create a path for redeploying the team to higher-value work.
The PMO’s New Job: From Administrators to Strategic Portfolio Partners
Modern PMOs/EPMOs curate the portfolio, surface trade-offs, and orchestrate the governance cadence. They standardize outcome metrics, maintain the portfolio “control tower,” and enable evidence-based reallocation in partnership with Finance and Product/Tech. This elevates the PMO from traffic cop to strategy’s operating system.
Closing Thought: Choose Less to Achieve More
The essence of a portfolio mindset is focus—on strategy, on outcomes, and on learning fast. When leaders commit to a few consequential priorities, fund durable teams, and run decisive reviews, they convert effort into impact. The shift is cultural as much as procedural, but the payoff is compounding: faster decisions, clearer accountability, and a pipeline of initiatives that actually move the needles that matter.