Fresh thinking on flow, capacity and the economics of getting the right projects finished. Newest first.
Once you have found the resource that sets your delivery speed, the obvious move is to get more of it. The obvious move is right, and the way almost every organisation executes it is wrong, because the only person qualified to train the new hire is the constraint itself. Capacity goes down before it goes up. Here is how deep that dip goes, how long it lasts, and why hiring into a crisis guarantees you pay the whole cost and collect none of the benefit.
Read the article →Every portfolio has a largest batch, and in most organisations it is not a project. It is the annual plan: a single event that commits twelve months of your scarcest capacity at the moment you know least, and then holds that commitment through the entire period in which better information arrives. The cost is not the budget cycle itself, it is the coupling of three decisions that have three different natural cadences.
Read the article →Your delivery organisation has a constraint, and you have probably gone looking for it. Downstream of it sits a second one that appears on no capacity plan: the number of changes your business can actually absorb in a year. When delivery outruns absorption, the extra output is not throughput, it is inventory, and it ages, decays, and lowers the capacity that would have cleared it.
Read the article →Drag cost tells you what a week of lateness is costing today. It is a rate, and putting it on a report alone assumes the cost of delay accrues in a straight line. Across most portfolios it does not: some value sits behind a cliff, some behind a step, and some is being taken by a competitor while you wait. Here are the four shapes, and the half-million-pound sequencing decision that flips when you know which one you are holding.
Read the article →Every commitment your portfolio makes rests on a capacity number, and that number is usually wrong by close to half. The gap is not random: unplanned operational demand concentrates on your constraint by construction, lands entirely on project work, and gets misdiagnosed as poor estimating year after year. Here is how to find the hours your plan counts and your constraint does not have.
Read the article →No one ever decides to make a project bigger. It happens one reasonable request at a time, each too small to argue with, until a three-month project has become a six-month one. Scope has a ratchet: requirements go in almost frictionlessly and almost never come out, so the total only ever climbs. Each addition is a project that skipped the queue, dodged the pricing, and was approved by no one.
Read the article →Expediting a project feels free: you move it up a list, you add no work, so it looks like you spend nothing. In a constrained portfolio the cost is real and it lands entirely on the work the urgent job jumped, every project behind it pays for the interruption. Unless the expedited job is genuinely the costliest per week, 'drop everything' has just destroyed value. Here is how to price the queue-jump before you order it.
Read the article →The most common thing a project does with its life is wait for someone with authority to decide something. That wait sits on no plan, consumes no capacity, and appears on no report, which is exactly why it goes unmanaged. Treat your steering board as the constrained resource it is, and the queue in front of it turns out to be one of the most expensive things in your portfolio.
Read the article →There is a team in your organisation that has just got faster, and it has made no difference to anything you deliver. That is not bad luck, it is arithmetic: an improvement made anywhere other than the constraint produces no extra throughput, and an improvement made upstream of it usually makes delivery worse. Here is where your improvement budget should have gone instead.
Read the article →Somewhere in your portfolio is a piece of work that has been finished more than once. We call it iteration, refinement, another pass. A large part of it is rework, and in a constrained portfolio it is far more expensive than the hours to do it again: it spends your scarcest resource twice, its cost escalates with how late you catch the error, and it re-enters the queue as new work in progress that slows everything else. Worse, the conditions that cause it are the ones it makes worse.
Read the article →Pausing a project feels like the safe, reversible move: you stop the spend and keep your options open. In a constrained portfolio it is usually the most expensive of the three things you can do with in-flight work, because the value clock never pauses, restart is not resume, and the capacity you freed was never really freed.
Read the article →A dependency looks free: it is just an arrow between two boxes on a plan. In flow terms it is one of the most expensive things you can add to a portfolio, because it forces you to wait on the slowest contributor, couples risks that used to be independent, and hides a queue that lives on no one's plan. Here is the economics of the seam.
Read the article →A project reports green for months, then turns red weeks before the deadline. That is not dishonesty, it is a measurement problem. Percent-complete tells you how much plan you have used, never how much risk remains. Buffer burn does, and it warns you while there is still time to act.
Read the article →A big project is not just more work than a small one. It ties up your constraint for longer, hides its problems until the end, and returns nothing until it is finished. Batch size is an economic choice, and most portfolios make it by accident.
Read the article →Starting a project feels like progress, so work gets released the moment it is approved. Releasing it before it is ready does not advance it, it stalls it, and the constraint pays for the restart.
Read the article →Every piece of Flow Economics advice begins with 'find your constraint.' Almost nobody tells you how, and the obvious answer, your busiest team, is usually the wrong one.
Read the article →Every task estimate carries hidden safety to protect against uncertainty. Three well-known behaviours consume it before it can protect anything, which is why padded plans still slip, and why pooling the safety fixes it.
Read the article →Every dashboard measures how busy your people are. None measures how much of a project's life is spent actually being worked on, and the two numbers pull in opposite directions.
Read the article →High utilisation looks like efficiency. On the resource that limits your delivery, loading it towards a hundred percent makes the whole portfolio dramatically slower, for reasons that are pure arithmetic.
Read the article →A portfolio where everything has started is a portfolio where very little is finishing. The fastest way to deliver more is to cap how much work you allow in flight at once.
Read the article →Ranking work by its total value promotes the projects that consume most of your scarcest resource. Here is the one number that puts them in the right order.
Read the article →When you add a project to a busy portfolio, the cost lands on the work already in flight, not on the new project. Here is how to price it before you commit.
Read the article →Putting your best specialist on every priority at once feels like good management. In a constrained system it delays all of them and destroys value.
Read the article →When a portfolio slips, the instinct is to add coordination. Past a point that makes delivery slower, not faster. Here is where the line sits.
Read the article →The most common objection to evolving the PMO into a Value Management Office is some version of this: we do not have the data.
Read the article →In most organisations, the decision to accelerate a project happens late, under pressure, and as a reaction to something going wrong.
Read the article →There is no shortage of maturity frameworks in project and portfolio management. Most peak exactly where the economics should begin.
Read the article →Every portfolio contains at least one project where the economics have quietly turned.
Read the article →Most project delays are reported as a red status and a revised date. Neither tells you what being late is costing.
Read the article →Everything is priority one. It is the most common phrase in multi-project organisations, and it is an economics problem.
Read the article →Most executives can tell you what their PMO costs to run. Almost none can tell you what running the portfolio without a VMO is costing them.
Read the article →Most PMO leaders never decide to become a Value Management Office. They drift into it. Here is how to tell if yours already has.
Read the article →Most answers give you a list. None tells you what the function actually does on a Tuesday morning. So here is what a VMO looks like in practice.
Read the article →The VMO is not a new department bolted on top of the PMO. It is what the PMO becomes when it starts deciding which work creates the most value.
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