Establishing flow through constraint-based portfolio.

Theory of Constraints meets portfolio reality.

Despite all the methods, frameworks, and tools, organizations that depend on large project portfolios struggle with the very basics: planning, managing, and reallocating their staff and resources. What's left from organisations when they are not able to tell what their employees should be working on — or what they should be working on first? The result is disorganisation and chaos, and ambitions that quickly erode under the weight of confusion, planning conflicts and overload.

Empower Your Projects provides this enabler and introduces is a totally new way of organizing project-driven organizations.

Instead of trying to schedule every single task of every project in the portfolio — assigning resources, balancing workloads, and constantly resolving planning conflicts — Empower Your Projects takes a radically different approach.

If you’ve ever tried traditional planning yourself, you know how impossibly complex, confusing, and contradictory it becomes.

Rooted in the Theory of Constraints and system dynamics, Empower Your Projects adapts algorithms long used to manage the flow of workstreams in production lines and logistics — fields that have mastered series and mass production for decades. Only minor adjustments were needed to make these methods work for large project portfolios with multiple paralll workstreams.

These algorithms don’t require detailed task-level scheduling. Yet, it provides one key output: the right start time for each project. This is enough to maintain continuous flow across the portfolio — without interruptions, without overload, and without gridlock.

It may sound complex — but it turns out to be surprisingly simple.

The transformation to a workstream-driven portfolio follows a predictable and executable path and begins with a simple inventory: available capacity, ongoing and already planned projects, and their capacity needs — all  visualized in the portfolio production plan. 

The portfolio production plan is the perfect instrument to steer the workstreams and portfolio realization, and the workstream planboard to keep track of the relative position of the projects in the workstream is the perfect instrument to keep the dynamics of the portfolio under control. This gets the portfolio flowing smoothly, fast, sufficient for break through results. This is a great way to start. 

Planning projects for the mid term keeps the workstreams going without interruption as more projects reach completion. Exploreing strategic directions for the long term helps develop the organization and prepare for projects that have not yet taken shape.

Getting more strategic priorities done starts by completing more projects now. Step by step, the tactical and strategic portfolio processes can then evolve and mature.

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