Do fewer things better: managing your initiatives

Ask a leadership team how many initiatives are running in their organisation and the answer is usually a guess. Ask the people doing the work and the number is almost always higher. There is the new system, the pricing project, the customer survey, the office move, three process improvements, a partnership that needs following up and a handful of things someone senior asked for last spring.

Each of them made sense when it started. Together, they spread the organisation so thin that very little gets finished. People move from meeting to meeting, progress is slow everywhere, and the most important work competes for attention with work that should have been stopped months ago.

The answer is not better project management on each initiative. It is managing all of them together, as one portfolio, with a clear view of how much the organisation can actually carry. This article describes a practical way to do that: how to see everything in one place, judge it, plan by real capacity, decide when to continue or stop, and keep it going with a simple monthly routine.

Why initiative overload happens

Overload rarely comes from one bad decision. It builds up over time, for understandable reasons.

• Starting is easier than stopping. A new initiative gets a kickoff and attention. Stopping one feels like admitting failure, so it rarely happens on purpose.
• Every initiative is decided alone. Each proposal is judged on its own merits, and most look reasonable. Nobody asks what it will push aside.
• Budget is treated as the limit. If there is money, the initiative is approved. But the real constraint is usually the time of a small number of key people.
• Initiatives come from many places. Leadership, departments, the board, customers and regulators all add work, often without seeing each other's lists.
• Busy feels productive. A full calendar looks like progress, even when very little reaches the finish line.

The hidden costs

The visible cost of too many initiatives is the money spent on them. The hidden costs are usually larger.

Context switching. When people work on many things at once, they lose time every time they switch. They need to remember where they were, catch up on what changed and get back into the problem. Spread across a week, this adds up to a real share of working time, and the work that requires deep concentration suffers most.

Half-finished work. An initiative delivers value when it is done and in use, not when it is 80 percent complete. Ten initiatives at 80 percent deliver nothing. Five finished ones deliver something. Half-finished work also carries ongoing costs: meetings, status reports and people who keep part of their mind on it.

Slower everything. When everything runs in parallel, everything takes longer. Say a team has four initiatives, each needing three months of focused work. Done one after the other, the first is finished after three months, and all four are done in a year. Done in parallel, with some time lost to switching, none are finished until well after a year. The total work is the same, but value arrives much later.

Tired people. Constant overload wears people down. The best people are often spread the thinnest, because everyone wants them on their initiative.

More initiatives do not mean more progress. Past a certain point, each new one slows down all the others.

Make every initiative visible in one list

You cannot manage what you cannot see. The first step is a single list of everything that is running or approved to start.

Keep it simple. A spreadsheet is enough. For each initiative, record:

• A short name and a one-sentence description of what it will achieve.
• An owner: one named person, not a department.
• Its status: idea, approved, running, paused or finished.
• The key people involved and roughly how much of their time it takes.
• The expected end date, and the next decision point.

Be generous in what you include. Anything that takes a meaningful share of people's time outside normal operations belongs on the list, whether or not it is called a project. The first version is usually a surprise. Many leadership teams find they have two or three times as many initiatives as they thought.

Classify them: run, improve, grow or transform

Not all initiatives play the same role, and they should not be judged in the same way. A simple classification helps.

1. Run. Work needed to keep the business going: required system upgrades, regulatory changes, replacing equipment that is wearing out. These are rarely optional, but they should still be done as efficiently as possible.
2. Improve. Work that makes the current business better: faster processes, lower costs, better quality, fewer errors. The value is usually fairly predictable.
3. Grow or transform. Work that builds something new: new markets, new offers, new ways of working. The value is less certain, but this is where the future of the business is shaped.

Once initiatives are classified, look at the balance. If almost everything is in run, the organisation is standing still. If there are many grow and transform initiatives but few finish, the ambition is ahead of the capacity. There is no single right mix, but the leadership team should choose it on purpose, not discover it by accident.

Assess value, effort, risk and strategic fit

With everything on one list, you can compare initiatives against each other. Use a few simple questions, scored on a rough scale, for example low, medium and high.

• Value. What will it deliver when it is done? More revenue, lower cost, reduced risk, better customer experience. Be as concrete as you can.
• Effort. How much time from key people will it take, and for how long?
• Risk. How likely is it to deliver what is promised? What could go wrong, and how much would that cost?
• Strategic fit. Does it support the few things the business has chosen to focus on? An initiative can be valuable and still be a distraction.

Do not over-engineer the scoring. The point is not a precise ranking, but a shared discussion. The most useful outcome is often that a few initiatives clearly stand out at the top, a few clearly belong at the bottom, and the leadership team agrees on both.

Watch out for initiatives that score low on value and fit but survive because someone important cares about them. They are often the ones to address first.

Capacity is the real constraint: count people, not budget

Most portfolio decisions are made in money. But money is rarely what runs out first. What runs out is the time of the people who know the systems, the customers and the processes well enough to make change happen.

So count people. For the key roles and teams, estimate how much time is available for initiatives after normal operations are covered. Then add up what the current initiatives require.

Here is a made-up example. Say a company has a team of five people in finance and IT who are involved in most changes. After daily operations, they have about 40 percent of their time for initiatives, which is two full-time equivalents. The current list asks for the equivalent of four and a half. It is no surprise that everything is late.

The options are clear, even if they are not easy:

• Stop or pause some initiatives until demand fits capacity.
• Run initiatives in sequence instead of in parallel.
• Add capacity, by hiring, bringing in temporary help or freeing people from other work.
• Reduce the scope of some initiatives so they need less.

What does not work is approving everything and hoping people will find the time. They will not, and the result is the overload described above.

A good rule of thumb is to plan for less than full capacity. Things go wrong, operations need attention and new needs appear. Leave some room.

Stage gates: continue, change or stop

An initiative should not be approved once and then run until it ends. It should earn its place at a few defined points along the way. These are often called stage gates.

A simple sequence works for most organisations:

1. Idea. Is the problem worth solving, and does it fit the strategy? If yes, spend a small amount of time to understand it better.
2. Ready to start. Is there a clear goal, an owner, a rough plan and the people needed? If yes, start the work.
3. Midway check. Is it on track to deliver the value expected? Has anything changed? Continue, change the scope or stop.
4. Ready to finish. Is the solution in use and is the value starting to show? Close it formally and hand it over to normal operations.

The key is to agree the criteria in advance. Before an initiative starts, write down what must be true at the next gate for it to continue. For example: a pilot with three customers completed, and at least two of them willing to pay. That makes the decision at the gate much easier, and much less personal.

Every gate should allow three outcomes: continue, change or stop. If the only realistic outcome is continue, the gate is not doing its job.

How to stop initiatives well

Stopping is the hardest part of portfolio management, and the most valuable. Every initiative that stops frees people to finish something else.

A few practices make it easier:

• Make stopping normal. Say from the start that some initiatives will be stopped, and that this is a sign the process is working. Stopping a weak initiative early is a good decision, not a failure.
• Separate the initiative from the person. An owner who stops their own initiative because the evidence says so should be recognised for it.
• Capture what was learned. Write a short note: what did we try, what did we find, what would we do differently. This turns sunk cost into knowledge.
• Close it properly. Tell the people involved, release them clearly and remove the initiative from calendars and status reports. A stopped initiative that keeps having meetings is not stopped.
• Use pause with care. Pausing can be the right call, but a pause without a date to revisit it is usually a slow stop. Set a date.

A simple monthly portfolio review

The portfolio stays healthy only if someone looks at it regularly. A monthly review of about an hour is usually enough for the leadership team.

A practical agenda:

1. Changes since last month. New proposals, finished initiatives, any that were stopped or paused.
2. Capacity check. Does the total demand still fit the available capacity of key people? Where is it tight?
3. Initiatives at a gate. Which ones have reached a decision point, and do they meet the criteria agreed in advance?
4. Initiatives in trouble. Which are behind, short of people or no longer clearly valuable? What do we do about them?
5. Decisions. Record what was decided, who acts, and by when.

The rule that makes the routine work is simple: a new initiative can only start if there is capacity for it, or if something else is stopped or paused to make room. That one rule changes the conversation from what else could we do to what matters most.

Where to start

You do not need a new system or a large programme to begin. A practical first month looks like this:

1. Build the list. Collect every running and approved initiative in one place, with an owner and the key people involved.
2. Classify and score. Sort them into run, improve and grow or transform, and score value, effort, risk and fit roughly.
3. Count capacity. For the most stretched people and teams, compare available time with what the initiatives require.
4. Make the first cuts. Choose a few initiatives to stop, pause or shrink so that demand comes closer to capacity.
5. Book the monthly review. Put it in the calendar and agree the rule that nothing new starts without room for it.

Doing fewer things at once feels uncomfortable at first. Some good ideas have to wait. But the initiatives that remain get the attention they need, finish sooner and start delivering value. Over a year, an organisation that does fewer things at a time usually ends up having done more.