Decluttering the Project Portfolio: Fewer at Once, More Finished

You declutter a project portfolio by matching the number of initiatives running at once to your organisation's throughput and by stopping, pausing or continuing each one against fixed criteria. The arithmetic is simple: average lead time equals the number of initiatives in progress divided by the number completed each month. Halve the first figure and, at constant throughput, you halve the wait for every result.

The turn of the year is the best moment for this exercise, because budgets are redistributed and the executive team is asking what will be delivered in the coming twelve months. This article sets out the calculation, a decision grid for choosing which initiatives continue, and a checklist that lets you order the portfolio in a single session.

Why does a full portfolio deliver less?

A full portfolio delivers less because every initiative that has been started absorbs attention, and every switch between initiatives costs time. In most organisations the portfolio grows by addition: each department brings its requests, the executive team approves them one at a time, and almost nothing is ever struck off. After two years forty initiatives can be running, and the same twenty key people sit on every steering committee.

Task switching has a measurable price. The computer scientist Gloria Mark of the University of California, Irvine, and her colleagues studied what interruptions do to office work: employees make up the lost time by working faster, and pay for it with more stress and frustration. Someone working on three initiatives at once switches several times a day and loses a large part of it to getting back into the line of thought. Added to this are queues: decision-makers, architects and subject-matter experts can only answer one initiative at a time. How these waiting times arise in detail is described in the article on flow metrics.

How many initiatives should run at the same time?

The number running at once should equal what your organisation completes on average within the lead time you want, and never exceed the number of teams or key people actually working on them. Little's Law from queueing theory, proved by John Little in 1961, supplies the arithmetic: average lead time equals average work in progress divided by average throughput.

The example shows why the decision is uncomfortable. Of 24 initiatives, 16 must be stopped or paused to bring lead time down to four months. The calculation assumes constant throughput, which is a cautious assumption: teams lose less time to switching and waiting, so throughput is more likely to rise than to fall. A ceiling on work in progress is the basic principle of the Kanban method, which the article on introducing Kanban describes for teams. At portfolio level the same logic applies.

Which initiatives are stopped, paused or continued?

An initiative continues if it has a named owner, a measurable effect and a realistic completion date. If any of the three is missing, it is paused or stopped. The grid below makes the decision traceable and prevents the influence of sponsors from setting the order.

Initiatives that are more than half complete are not continued automatically. The money already spent is gone whichever way the decision falls. What counts is what completion still costs and what it will deliver. Organisations find this discipline hard, which is why it belongs in a fixed rhythm with the executive team.

The approach in five steps

Decluttering works as a sequence of five steps that can be completed in four to six weeks, provided the executive team sets the decision dates in advance.

1. Inventory: all initiatives on one list, with owner, metric, participants and remaining effort. The list includes initiatives that were never formally commissioned but still absorb capacity.
2. Capacity: the number of completions per month and the number of teams that actually deliver. The ceiling follows from the calculation above.
3. Assessment: each initiative is placed in the grid. The business unit and delivery management do this together, and the executive team decides.
4. Communication: stopped initiatives are ended openly, with an explanation for those involved. Letting an initiative fade out quietly keeps drawing attention.
5. Rhythm: a new initiative starts only when a running one has been completed or the executive team deliberately pauses another. Every three months the portfolio is reassessed.

Step four is often underestimated. People who never learn that an initiative has ended keep working on it in their heads and hold back decisions. A clear end point releases capacity. Where many initiatives depend on one another, the approach in the article on dependencies between teams helps as well.

Checklist: is your portfolio overloaded?

Your portfolio is overloaded if at least three of the following five statements apply.

• The number of initiatives in progress exceeds three times the completions per quarter.
• The same people sit on more than three steering committees.
• More than a quarter of the initiatives showed no visible progress in the last 90 days.
• New initiatives start without an existing one having ended.
• The executive team can say for each initiative who is responsible, but not which metric will change.

If you answer yes to three or more statements, decluttering has already been postponed too long. The article on shortening time to market shows where the capacity you release has the greatest effect on delivery time.

Decluttering with Niehues Consulting

Niehues Consulting is a consultancy for AI management and organisation design, seen from the delivery perspective, based in Düsseldorf. Founder Marin Niehues builds organisations that deliver, in projects ranging from VC-funded scale-ups to DAX 40 corporations and in more than 20 countries on six continents. In the service area of delivery management he works as delivery manager, project manager and product owner and shapes the organisation in which portfolio decisions are actually carried out.

The approach follows the Niehues Delivery Model. For a portfolio, two of its test questions matter most: which business result should change measurably? And who decides, who delivers, who uses? Any initiative that cannot answer these questions belongs on the list of candidates for pausing. The starting point is a free initial consultation of 30 minutes, which you can arrange via the contact page. Scope and terms of an engagement are discussed there.