I’ve just taken over a Portfolio Manager role and things feel chaotic. We have 50 active projects but only 30% are hitting their dates. Is this a sign of poor project management, or is the PPM system itself fundamentally broken? What are the early warning signs I should look for to diagnose the root cause?
3 answers
If 70% of projects are missing dates, the system is definitely overloaded. The #1 indicator of a failing PPM is "Lack of Early Indicators." Are you only seeing that a project is failing when it hits its deadline? A healthy system uses "Leading Metrics" like resource burn-up and dependency health. Another sign is "Static Reviews"—if your portfolio reports are just PowerPoints that take two weeks to build, the data is dead before you see it. You likely have a mismatch between your available capacity and your authorized work. You aren't managing a portfolio; you're managing a traffic jam.
Have you checked the "Strategic Alignment" of those 50 projects? How many of them actually map back to a specific, measurable key result for this year?
Look for "Duplicate Initiatives." Often, failing portfolios have two or three different teams building almost the exact same tool because they don't have a centralized view of work.
Redundancy is a silent profit killer, Amanda. Consolidating those duplicates is the easiest way to immediately increase your delivery capacity without hiring a single person.
Gregory, I did a quick audit and realized 15 projects are "carry-overs" from three years ago that no one has the heart to kill. This is exactly what Susan meant by a traffic jam. We have these legacy initiatives sucking up 40% of our talent, leaving the new, high-priority projects starved for resources. My first move is to implement a "Mandatory Sunsetting" policy where every project must re-justify its existence every 6 months or face automatic termination. This should clear the deck for the work that actually matters.