The Portfolio

Programs and objectives

A program groups projects that serve the same larger goal. An objective is the outcome those projects are supposed to produce.

The reason to bother is that projects are the wrong unit for a leadership question. 'How is the platform migration going' spans four projects; asking about each one separately produces four statuses and no answer. A program rolls them up.

Keep the hierarchy shallow. Projects into programs, programs against objectives, and stop. Every additional layer is a level someone has to maintain, and the marginal insight from the fourth level is close to zero.

Budgets and forecasts

Budgets are per project and roll up. Forecasts project where you will land against them.

The useful discipline here is to treat the forecast, not the spend, as the number to watch. Spend tells you what already happened, which you cannot change. The forecast tells you where you are going, which you can — and the moment worth acting on is when the forecast crosses the budget, not when the spend does.

For client work, this is also where the connection to the client record pays off: a project over forecast on an account already marked At Risk is a different conversation from the same overrun on a healthy account.

The Resources tab

This is the tab to actually use.

It carries capacity, allocation, and team availability. Leaders can raise an availability request; members respond with what they have. There are also standing availability entries for regular patterns.

Everything downstream reads this. The sprint planner's capacity number comes from here. Assignment recommendations weigh it. Any statement about whether the team can take on more work is either built on this or is a guess.

So the operational habit is: raise an availability request at the start of each planning period, chase the responses, and only then plan. Planning first and collecting availability afterwards is the common order and it is backwards.

Allocation: finding the double-committed person

Allocation shows who is committed to what across projects. It is the surface that catches the specific failure that boards cannot: someone who is 60% allocated on two different projects, where each project's board looks entirely reasonable.

This is worth a deliberate check every planning period. The people it catches are usually the ones everybody wants — the person with the rare skill, the one who unblocks things — which is exactly why they end up over-allocated and why nobody notices until they become the constraint.

When you find one, the answer is a conversation about which commitment gives, made in advance. The alternative is that reality decides, usually badly, and usually at the end of the period.