Your portfolio is not slow because it lacks resources. It is slow because you opened too many projects at the same time.
Rami Goldratt and Ajai Kapoor have just published Mastering Flow (2025), the implementation guide to the Rules of Flow. It applies the Theory of Constraints to multi-project environments (engineering, IT, construction and R&D) with a single goal: deliver more of the right projects, in less lead time, with the same resources.
The guiding idea is uncomfortable for any executive committee: a project portfolio is managed like a production line. And the great destroyer of flow is not a lack of talent or budget. It is bad multitasking and excessive WIP: too many projects open in parallel.
The counterintuitive move is this: to deliver more, start fewer.
When everything is a priority, nothing flows. The framework brings order through rules that operate at a strategic level, not merely on a Kanban board:
- Triage: work only on the right priorities and eliminate the “nice-to-haves” that no one dares to kill.
- Control WIP: do not launch projects too early; less concurrency shortens lead time across the entire portfolio.
- Full-kit: do not start a task until everything required to complete it is available (the equivalent of a Definition of Ready). Most rework begins when this step is skipped.
- Global optimum over local optimum: an improvement in one area matters only if it improves the overall flow. The focus is the bottleneck, not the apparent efficiency of each silo.
- Project buffers: remove the “safety” each task keeps for itself and consolidate it into a single buffer monitored against actual progress. This is what counters Student Syndrome and Parkinson’s Law.
So what?
If you are a CEO or COO, your constraint is probably not capacity. It is concurrency. Every project that is open at the same time imposes an invisible tax on every other project, and on your delivery time.
In a personal cut: no tool, ERP or AI can fix a portfolio overwhelmed by WIP. Technology amplifies the flow you already have; if that flow is broken, it amplifies the chaos. Flow first. Technology second.
How many projects does your organisation have open today? And how many could you close this week?
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PABLO CORTE · CORTE CONSULTORES
Executive experience and consulting applied to understanding processes, accountability, evidence and results.
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