Want More Speed? Stop Running So Fast and Fix the Portfolio First

If you’ve ever been told to “just run harder” when projects are piling up, congratulations. You’ve encountered one of the most damaging myths in project management.

The myth? That approving more work means more progress.

Here’s the reality: running faster doesn’t help if you’re heading in the wrong direction.

This article draws on a Project Management Mythbusters session with Al Zeitoun, looking at why pressure for speed so often produces the opposite result: slower delivery and poorer outcomes.

You can watch the full session below, or continue reading for the key insights.

The Overload Trap

We see this over and over. A PMO leader told me just yesterday how overloaded their team was. Projects were piling up, executives were pushing for “faster, faster” delivery, followed by the inevitable complaints about low quality and expensive rework.

Do the math. Is it really faster if you have to do it twice?

This isn’t a new problem. Too much work can get approved without forcing real trade-offs at the portfolio level. Get those decisions wrong up front and you’ve already set your teams up to fail.

The Real Secret to Speed: Slowing Down

The best PMOs are the ones willing to slow decisions down at the front door. They push back, ask hard questions, and make sure the right work gets approved before execution starts.

Project prioritization isn’t optional. When teams are stretched too thin, it’s almost never a lack of people. It’s a prioritization problem. Delivery slows when too many initiatives get the green light without forcing real choices about what won’t be done.

Michael Hannan and Stuart Easton explore this from a portfolio-flow perspective in Avoid Project Portfolio Disasters: keeping everyone busy can conflict with completing more work, and starting more projects can create more waiting rather than faster finishes.

Saying No Without Getting Fired

Executives love big ideas. But big ideas without prioritization are just a wish list. This is where data shifts the conversation from opinion to consequence.

We often use a simple exercise. Add a few “must-do” executive projects to an already full portfolio and see what gets displaced. In one recent session, the impact was clear. A $200M loss from pushing higher-value work aside.

The most effective way to educate executives isn’t to argue. It’s to make the trade-offs visible and let leaders own the consequences of their choices.

But what if showing the trade-offs still doesn’t change the conversation? In Breaking the Cycle of Overload, Rebecca Reynolds, Mike Hannan, Frederic Casagrande and Stuart Easton examine the gap between executive intent and delivery reality. Their discussion reaches the same portfolio question: sometimes the underlying constraint is too many projects, not too little effort, and the PMO needs to translate overload into business consequences leadership can act on.

Culture Eats Tools for Breakfast

Tech can help. AI, PPM software, dashboards can make problems visible. But they won’t fix bad habits. If leaders still reward saying “yes” to everything and dodge tough trade-off conversations, no tool on earth will save you.

Effective PMOs align leaders around a shared set of priorities and set realistic expectations about what can actually be delivered. They’re not magical project butlers who “make it happen.” They’re there to drive better decisions.

This perspective is explored in more depth in Creating Experience-Driven Organizational Culture: How to Drive Transformative Change with Project and Portfolio Management by Al Zeitoun, which looks at how leadership behavior and decision culture shape portfolio and project outcomes.

The Bottom Line

Want more speed? Stop approving everything at once and make the trade-offs explicit.

• Prioritize first, execute second.
• Use data to push back without making it personal.
• Don’t start more projects than your teams can handle.
• Culture matters more than tools.

Your Next Step as a Portfolio Leader

If this sounds familiar, the problem probably isn’t execution speed.

It’s that too much work is being approved without forcing real trade-offs. Once that happens, no amount of delivery pressure will fix it.

TransparentChoice helps make those trade-offs visible by comparing feasible portfolio choices against leadership priorities and constraints, so you can see what changes when another commitment is added.

👉 See how TransparentChoice software works →

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