Mature portfolio Obeya and the hidden cost of metrics.
Obeya Summit speaker Gerard Berends shows how two mature portfolio organisations improved their project portfolio lead times by up to 9%. Not by adding more, but by deliberately doing less.
Metrics tell us how the work is progressing. But almost nobody asks whether the work should still be done at all. Gerard points to a flaw in the way most portfolio governance is built: it is
designed to optimise execution, not reconsideration. Initiatives often keep running long after their strategic relevance has gone.
This is not a failure of discipline or maturity. In fact even the opposite: most mature portfolio Obeya environments do exactly what they were designed to do: review performance. They were simply never designed to ask whether an initiative should still exist. The blind spot is built into the design, not into the people running it.
He calls these initiatives
Cold Cases: work that is active, funded and visible, simply because nobody is ever explicitely asked whether the work still deserves to exist.
What you'll learn:- Why most portfolio metrics focus on execution, not relevance
- How mature portfolio Obeya environments unintentionally create Cold Cases
- Why stopping an initiative feels harder than continuing it
- How a dedicated 'Existence Review' restores stopping and repriotisation as legitimate governance acts
- How structurally reviewing strategic relevance reduced lead times ands dependencies in two real portfolios
- How to begin immediately: every participant leaves with a tool to open their first Cold Case.
