Too Many Projects - The Ultimate Guide

Running Too Many Projects is a serious organisational problem. It can create a suffocating negativity that erodes effectiveness and drains an organisation’s ability to perform. Having too many projects can be demotivating, confusing and make it harder for leaders to deliver their goals. It can also be costly.

If you’re suffering from Too Many Projects you probably know it, but let’s confirm. Are people juggling so many commitments that work keeps stopping and restarting, shared specialists are pulled in different directions, and promised finish dates keep slipping? If so, the problem isn’t a magic number of projects. It’s that too much work is competing for the same capacity.

Too Many Projects can trap your business in a self-perpetuating cycle of delayed work, frustration and fire-fighting. Sounding familiar?

An overloaded portfolio may also be carrying work that is no longer worthwhile. Zombie projects where the value died a while ago but nobody told the team, or pet projects where the value never existed, but nobody told the boss.

Solving Too Many Projects offers leaders the chance to transform organizations, building trust, velocity & focus… but thinking it’s simple is almost always a mistake.

This guide is here to help you make it happen. Let’s dive in.

The causes of Too Many Projects

1. No Clear Strategy
2. Cynical Culture
3. Weak Process

The causes of Too Many Projects can be grouped into three buckets – Strategy, Culture & Process. Drop one and your transformation plan will probably fail. Sorry.

1. No Clear Strategy

Directing an organisation is challenging; even the greatest leaders will have their blind spots.

Here’s a quick checklist that will help you understand potential leadership shortfall:

• Lack of clear definition of what matters most – are leaders facing into challenging industry trends & competitive risks to make tough calls?
• Tendency for leaders to get drawn too far into the detail, where their power makes it hard for SMEs to challenge, but lack of current ‘on the ground’ exposure may limit their insight.
• Inability to say “no” especially to their own pet projects…
• … tendency to say “yes” to a new initiative without worrying too much about the impact.
• Sense that pushing in one more initiative will be fine: people will ‘find a way’ to absorb it, while failing to recognise that teams are getting demotivated and leaving.
• Rigid silos in resource allocation that create ‘pots’ of money that don’t make any sense and encourage horse trading between directors rather than issue-led collaboration.

For a deeper look at why leaders keep adding initiatives without stopping existing work, see Too Many Projects by Rose Hollister and Michael Watkins in Harvard Business Review.

2. Cynical Culture

It’s said that culture will eat strategy for breakfast. It’ll probably then have your profit for lunch and your career for dinner. In this context culture means ‘the way we do things around here’.

Here are the signs that you may have a cultural issue to resolve:

• Your people are suffering; they don’t like the culture, finding the pressure of Too Many Projects simply isn’t worth what you’re offering them – there are better jobs out there.
• Deadlines are seen as soft, or specifications changed ad-hoc to hit goals: either way there is an eye-rolling expectation that what is promised will not be delivered.
• ‘Over-Meeting’ culture is pervasive with too much time scheduled in talking about projects, and not enough time spent on delivering them. Perhaps you need a meeting to discuss this?
• Interaction is defensive & tactical with people ‘bracing for impact’ with their colleagues rather than searching proactively for positive outcomes using one another’s abilities.
• Estimations are nonsense. Business requests have inflated returns to justify inflated resource asks from delivery teams. In this context honesty is usually punished.
• Prioritization is done by front-line staff, as central teams process their projects without respect to capacity constraints of colleagues who must implement everything (as priority, obvs).

3. Weak Process

The third leg of a successful project eco-system is a robust process that creates organisation without excessive paperwork.

• Weak governance is a sign of lack of organizational discipline. Weakness can mean data is messy and visibility poor; or can mean a process is so onerous it’s not followed.
• The planning process keeps changing in search of the perfect model. Or worse, continuous re-orgs. A new spreadsheet / boss / set of goals every year is demoralising and hard work.
• Ignoring Benefits Realization. If you are too busy to reflect on (in)completed projects, then you are destined to make the same mistakes again. Without learning there will be no progress.
• Nobody trusts the process if nobody sticks to the plan. To succeed a process must have control – cutting out the distortive effect of ‘corridor politics’ and CEO brainwaves.
• Projects drag on, failing to either finish or be shut down, as scopes creep & criteria change.
• You have the wrong tools. Prioritization is a black box in an over-complex spreadsheet and data is spread across different systems, with no clear way to compare or aggregate.
• Priorities are agreed, but commitments do not change. Does the ranking affect which projects receive funding and capacity, or does everything remain approved and competing for the same people?
• Approved projects are not started according to priority, or resource availability but all run concurrently irrespective of bandwidth to deliver – i.e. it’s a free for all. See why doing more at once can slow project flow.
• Work intake backlogs are opaque / chaotic, with a ‘spaghetti-mess’ relationship between service providers and internal clients, where accountability and visibility are patchy at best.

Figuring out the right balance of process vs. ‘just getting on with it’ is an important step in its own right.

How to get the right number of projects

1. Develop a Clear Strategy
2. Foster a culture of respect
3. Build a Process that will last

Do any of these points sound familiar? They can reinforce one another. Departments add commitments that each make sense locally but compete for the same people. Delivery teams keep work moving by multitasking and absorbing pressure, which can hide the overload for a while. When deadlines slip, leaders may demand tighter execution or more reporting instead of revisiting what they approved. That is why success comes from the three areas working in tandem, not in isolation.

1. Develop a Clear Strategy

Too Many Projects often reflects a lack of agreement over what really matters. Leaders have to face those choices, which may mean some uncomfortable ‘managing up’.

Here are tips for your leaders:

• Too Many Projects means leaders waste time chasing missed deadlines and sitting in (too many) oversight committees. Divert that energy to up-front planning, defining value so others can focus on the detail.
• Set better goals and empower teams by making them accountable against measurable outcomes. Exactly how they hit those goals is their responsibility.
• Role model saying “no” – recognise that ideas are like rose buds: all very pretty but if you don’t prune some back then eventually the whole plant dies.
• Challenge initiatives to show realistic resource plans. Put a new request alongside existing commitments and ask leadership what would give way to free up funding and capacity. That may mean stopping existing projects when starting something new, changing scope or deferring work. A new priority is not a resource plan.
• Stop rewarding managers who overwork their teams to hit poorly planned deadlines.
• Prioritize at a higher level and be ready to move resources between silos to create a nimble organisation that responds to changes in the market, rather than pandering to directors’ egos.

To solve ‘Too Many Projects’ leaders must be role models for better ways of working. We recommend they create well defined measurable goals, then give their teams the resource & space they need to deliver.

2. Foster a culture of respect

Too Many Projects can also be a sign that something is going wrong with how people work together and how their time and judgement are respected.

Here are our tips to fix it:

• Understand how people work today: are they inefficient due to excessive multi-tasking, losing time to context shifting & too many catch up meetings to discuss incomplete work? If a junior engineer spends much of their week in meetings, ask which ones help resolve issues and which ones just take time away from delivery.
• Include ‘flex’ in your schedule. If there are usually urgent ad-hoc requests then plan for them, rather than forcing people to work 60 hours or dropping commitments to other projects.
• Linked to this… make deadlines achievable & real so accountability for delivery can become greater, and commitments become reliable.
• Encourage department leaders to have greater cross-team empathy and put more focus on understanding how their workload relates to that of their colleagues. Cutting projects in one area to push work to another is not prioritization – it’s deflection.
• Make estimation a team sport. Different people may see different risks, dependencies and resource needs. Where estimates rely on judgement, collect independent perspectives, compare the assumptions behind them and discuss the differences before settling on a plan.

We recommend putting time into landing this reboot – a workshop or off-site is ideal. Success will be defined by the participation & attitudes of people in your organization, so don’t be afraid of over-communication.

3. Build a Process that will last

A new process is more likely to stick when leaders give clear direction and the culture supports honest discussion of capacity and priorities. It can then help turn a promising new way of working into repeatable choices about what starts, waits and stops.

Here’s how:

• Governance needs structure. This starts by having all the projects in one place, with a core set of shared templates to capture data and measure value, before, during and after delivery. Also account for operational duties, small changes and informal initiatives that draw on the same people, even if they stay outside formal governance. Without them, the official portfolio can look feasible when the teams expected to deliver it are already committed elsewhere.
• Make change iterative, rather than constantly re-inventing how things are done. It won’t be perfect, but performance comes from the muscle memory of participants, not another new set of reporting lines brought in to try and solve problems caused by having Too Many Projects.
• Add a Benefits Realization step in your critical path and develop the discipline to always deliver it. Put time into the plan, and incentives into objectives. Failure to learn undermines progress.
• Give the planning process teeth. Or more specifically give it budget, such that any new initiatives must be prioritized properly, and ongoing projects must re-justify budget.
• Software will help but be clear about what type of solution you need. There are three steps to consider – Prioritization, Organization & Governance. Different tools have different capabilities, so determine what matters most to you, and if you need a macro or micro level of modelling.
• Model urgency based on real data: external deadlines, risk and cost of delay are just a few of many valid drivers. The impatience of a senior exec is not.
• Turn your spaghetti mess into a series of structured backlogs and ensure that your prioritization process overlays resource by team as a lens on which projects should be actioned.

We recommend using Technology to drive process led performance gains. But new software alone will only add value if you have the commitment of your leadership and your colleagues to make it work. Otherwise, it’s just another task that won’t deliver value.

How to make change happen

If you’re nodding your head in recognition then it’s time to start the journey. Becoming an organisation that runs the right number of projects isn’t trivial, but it is possible.

Here at TransparentChoice we see clients driving change – Gerry’s journey for example. On a different scale, a 2018 Institute for Government analysis of UK government departmental plans found the same problem unresolved: too many stated priorities, without a clear link to the resources needed to deliver them.

You’ll need the support of your leadership; you’ll need to challenge ‘the way we do things around here’ and you’ll need a usable prioritisation process – so decisions about what starts, waits and stops are grounded in clear priorities and the resources actually available. Start with the data you have and improve the process, data and tools as you learn; the first useful portfolio choice shouldn't have to wait for a perfect system.

Getting leadership involved can be the hardest part. In Breaking the Cycle of Overload, Rebecca Reynolds, Mike Hannan, Frederic Casagrande and Stuart Easton discuss how PMO leaders can raise the systemic causes of firefighting, ask better questions and make the business consequences visible to executives.

If overload has become a live choice about which existing commitments to continue, change or stop, and whether new work can be supported within available funding and capacity, Book a Decision Review. It’s a 30-minute, no-fee, confidential conversation with Stuart Easton to work through what is changing, what is constrained and what would need to change for a different answer. Together, you can consider whether TransparentChoice is relevant and what an appropriate next step might be. No preparation or confirmed sponsorship is needed.

Watch: Fixing Too Many Projects the Right Way

In this presentation at the Global Project Management Forum, Stuart Easton explores the costs of running too many projects and how better prioritization can help organisations focus on work they can deliver. He introduces Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), portfolio visualisations and the limitations of spreadsheet-based prioritization.

To see how TransparentChoice connects leadership priorities with funding and capacity when comparing portfolio choices, explore the software.

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