No matter what industry, most enterprises face the same threat that silently kills their portfolio performance and doesn’t allow them to deliver value. Teams juggle dozens or even hundreds of concurrent projects, huge budgets are invested in these initiatives, but the outcomes don’t match the expectations.
This is caused by the strategy misalignment crisis. “You can’t execute what you can’t align”, says Dr. Ir. Albert Ponsteen, a researcher, portfolio management professional, and co-founder of Epicflow. “The symptoms are familiar to all of us: unclear priorities, overloaded teams, and portfolios that fail to deliver meaningful value”.
The recently introduced Epicflow Portfolio Optimizer (EPO) was created in response to these challenges. It serves as a bridge between high-level strategy and real-world execution to overcome the misalignment crisis and support enterprises in consistent value delivery.
The Strategy Alignment Crisis
Most companies facing the strategic misalignment crisis describe the same problems: priorities that constantly compete with one another, teams stretched too thin, decisions made without clarity, disappointing ROI, and snowballing delays across the portfolio.
“The problems rarely come from poor execution,” says Dr. Ponsteen. “This is the result of executing the wrong things or executing the right things at the wrong time”. When strategy, operational flow, and resource capacity aren’t aligned, portfolio performance collapses.
One of the goals of EPO is to synchronize these elements of portfolio execution to ensure that organizations are doing the right work at the right moment with resources they actually have.
Clarity for Executives
Value-driven portfolio management begins with determining the right strategy. This is where senior leaders should step in to determine the further direction for portfolio execution, but their decisions will be based on fragmented data, office politics, or intuition.
To prioritize effectively, they need data-driven insights to understand which projects are truly worth investment. EPO provides them with the intelligence they need, helping answer the critical questions questions:
- Are we investing in the right work?
- What is the impact of adding, delaying, or cancelling a project?
- Do we need to hire more people to deliver earlier?
- How can we deliver faster without overloading teams?
These insights provide executives with the grounds for making decisions that align strategy with execution, replacing guesswork with evidence.
The Resource Capacity Blind Spot
The other essential link in the strategic alignment chain, which is often overlooked, is resource capacity. Even when organizations identify the projects with the highest value potential, many still assume that their teams will find a way to cope with additional workload. In reality, capacity is finite, and ignoring those limits can quietly derail even the most well-designed strategy.
“Overloaded resources are what you should avoid by hook or by crook,” Dr. Ponsteen explains. “When teams have too much on their plates, they become unproductive. What is worse, this leads to snowballing bottlenecks resulting in serious delivery delays.”
EPO helps enterprises address the resource capacity challenge. It analyzes value through the prism of constrained resource hours to help organizations to determine which projects should move forward and which should wait. This prevents companies from starting more work that their team can realistically deliver.
A New Operating Model for C-suite Executives and Portfolio Leaders
Executives today face unprecedented complexity: talent shortages, inflation pressure, rising demand for innovation. Simply hiring more people or increasing budgets is longer an actionable solution. Instead, enterprises need to deliver more value with resources they already have.
In this reality, EPO helps senior management and portfolio leaders make decisions not based on hopes, but on real evidence, offering a smarter alignment-based operating model.
In an environment where every investment must prove its value, alignment becomes a competitive advantage. As Dr. Ponsteen concludes, “The future of delivery isn’t doing more work; it’s doing the right work with resources you already have.”