No portfolio gets bloated on purpose. It happens one approved idea at a time, each one reasonable in isolation, until the PMO is running forty projects and can defend maybe a dozen of them in a strategic review.
The wrong question
"Should we do this?" is asked once, at the start, usually in a meeting where saying no felt harder than saying yes. After that, the project simply exists. Nobody asks the question again.
The better question isn't asked at approval. It's asked continuously: does this still deserve the resource it's consuming?
Where the bloat comes from
Most organisations have no formal gate between "someone had an idea" and "a project team is now fully staffed against it." An idea arrives in a meeting, a Slack thread, a conversation with a vendor. It sounds plausible. Nobody owns the job of saying it should wait, or die, before it consumes budget and headcount.
By the time a portfolio review happens, the project already has a team, a plan, and a sense of momentum that makes it politically expensive to kill — even when it was never linked to a strategic goal in the first place.
What it costs
Teams end up 100% utilised on projects no one can connect to a strategic outcome. Boards approve portfolios their PMO can't defend in business terms. Every project that shouldn't exist is one fewer resource available for the project that should.
What a proper intake process looks like
The fix isn't more prioritisation meetings. It's a gate, applied before an idea becomes a funded project:
- Every idea captured in one place, with a type and a description — not scattered across email and memory.
- A status that isn't binary: Draft, Under Review, Approved, Rejected. Most ideas should sit somewhere other than "approved" for a while.
- An alignment score against the portfolio's actual objectives, visible before headcount is committed, not after.
Project Director's Ideas & Opportunities pipeline is built around exactly this gate — ideas get scored against strategic fit before they're allowed to become a project, which means the bloat gets stopped at the door, not discovered eighteen months later in a review nobody enjoys.
The reframe
The right number of projects to kill in most portfolios is almost always higher than the organisation thinks — because most of the killing should have happened before the project ever started.
Run your next idea through a gate before it becomes a headcount commitment.
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