Portfolio Reprioritisation Under Existential Threat
The portfolios that adapted fastest were the ones that had the fewest rules about how to change — not because they were undisciplined, but because their governance distinguished between the decision and the paperwork.
The Week Everything Was Reprioritised
In the third week of March, portfolio offices across every sector did something they had never done before: they reprioritised their entire investment portfolio in days rather than quarters. Programmes were paused, funding was redirected, resources were redeployed, and initiatives that had been considered strategically critical the previous Friday were shelved by the following Monday.
Seven months later, it is worth asking what that experience actually revealed — not about the crisis, but about portfolio management itself. Because the speed with which organisations reprioritised under existential pressure exposed something uncomfortable: the normal-time prioritisation process, with its scoring frameworks, its strategic alignment assessments, its quarterly review cycles and its investment committees, was not the thing that prevented faster reprioritisation. It was the thing that had been preventing it all along.
What the Triage Actually Looked Like
The pattern was remarkably consistent across organisations, regardless of sector or maturity. In the space of days, portfolio decisions that would normally have taken months were made by small groups of senior leaders using three brutally simple criteria: Does this keep the business running? Does this protect our people? Can we afford it right now?
Everything else was stopped, paused, or deprioritised. Not through a structured assessment, not through a weighted scoring model, not through a benefits realisation review — but through the exercise of judgement by people who understood the business well enough to know what mattered and what could wait.
The striking thing was not that this happened. It was that it worked. The decisions made under pressure in March have, by and large, held. The programmes that were kept running were the right ones. The programmes that were paused were, in most cases, the ones that should have been paused. The resource reallocation was, in retrospect, broadly correct. Organisations did not need their scoring frameworks to make good portfolio decisions. They needed leaders who understood the business and the authority to act.
Organisations did not need their scoring frameworks to make good portfolio decisions under pressure. They needed leaders who understood the business and the authority to act. The frameworks were not wrong — they were slow, and slowness is its own kind of wrong.
The Uncomfortable Questions
This raises questions that portfolio management professionals — including, if I am honest, myself — would prefer not to answer.
The first is about speed. If good portfolio decisions can be made in days, why do they normally take months? The standard answer is that normal-time decisions are more complex, more nuanced, more consequential. But this is not entirely convincing. Many of the decisions made in March were complex and consequential — programmes with budgets in the tens of millions were paused or redirected. The difference was not the complexity of the decision but the tolerance for imperfection. In crisis, a decision that is eighty percent right today is vastly more valuable than a decision that is ninety-five percent right in three months. In normal times, organisations behave as though the opposite is true, and the portfolio governance process is structured to deliver the ninety-five percent answer even when the eighty percent answer would have been sufficient.
The second question is about governance overhead. The portfolios that adapted fastest were the ones that had the fewest rules about how to change — not because they were undisciplined, but because their governance distinguished between the decision and the paperwork. The decision to pause a programme is a judgement call that an experienced leader can make quickly. The process of documenting the rationale, updating the portfolio plan, recalculating the benefits profile, revising the resource plan, and submitting the change through the appropriate approval chain is administrative work that serves a legitimate purpose but should never be mistaken for the decision itself. In crisis, the administration was stripped away and the decision remained. The question is why so much of the administration exists in the first place.
The third question is the hardest. If senior leaders can make sound portfolio judgements under pressure without the apparatus of portfolio management, what exactly is the apparatus for? The answer I have arrived at — reluctantly, because it challenges the profession I have worked in for years — is that the apparatus serves two functions, only one of which is about quality.
The first function is genuine: it provides a structured way to compare unlike investments, to surface dependencies and conflicts, to ensure that the portfolio as a whole is coherent. This is real and valuable work that becomes more important as the portfolio grows in scale and complexity.
The second function is political: it distributes accountability for portfolio decisions across enough people and enough process that no individual bears the full weight of getting it wrong. This is understandable but costly, because it is the primary reason that portfolio reprioritisation is slow. The process is slow not because the analysis takes time but because the consensus takes time, and consensus takes time because it exists to spread risk.
What Should Change
The lesson is not that portfolio governance should be dismantled. It is that the profession needs to be more honest about the difference between governance that improves decisions and governance that delays them.
“The process is slow not because the analysis takes time but because the consensus takes time, and consensus takes time because it exists to spread risk.”
The crisis demonstrated that there is a tier of portfolio decisions — stop, start, pause, redirect — that can be made quickly by leaders with sufficient understanding of the business and sufficient authority to act. Normal-time portfolio governance should make it easier to make these decisions, not harder. The scoring frameworks, the alignment assessments, the quarterly review cycles should be inputs to a decision, not gates around one.
Organisations that take this seriously will redesign their portfolio governance around two principles. First, that the speed of portfolio adjustment is itself a strategic capability, not an administrative inconvenience. Second, that the role of portfolio management is to ensure that leaders have the information they need to decide well — not to create a process that substitutes for the act of deciding.
Seven months on, most portfolio offices are rebuilding the processes that March demolished. Some of that rebuilding is necessary. But if we rebuild exactly what we had before, we will have learned nothing from the most important portfolio management lesson of the decade: that when it mattered most, the process was the obstacle, not the solution.