Not long ago, a CIO I was working with approved the next year's portfolio in 40 minutes. The list held 31 initiatives, funded and prioritized, with a roadmap that fit on one page. It was the cleanest approval I had seen in any organization.
In the second week of January of the following year, the same CIO asked a question in a steering meeting: Who is assigned to the first project? He was not asking who sponsored it. He was asking which person on the team was going to do the work. Nobody answered for close to one minute.
Every one of the 31 initiatives had an executive sponsor. That was never the gap. Nine of the 31 also had a named delivery lead, meaning an actual person with a percentage of their time committed to it. The other 22 had a department name in that column. By March, four of those 22 had not started. By June, two were cancelled for reasons that had nothing to do with their business cases. Nobody was ever assigned to them.
The gap between approved and staffed
Approval and staffing are two separate acts, and most portfolios complete only the first one. The approval meeting produces a funded list with a sponsor on each line. The staffing decision puts named people against that list, and nobody owns that second step. Finance owns the money, sponsors own the outcome, and line managers own the people. The arithmetic connecting funded work to available people falls between them, and the PMO is the only function positioned to do it.
I have seen this in financial services, technology, and public-sector portfolios, and the issue is always the same. The plan is ambitious, the budget is real, and the people to do the work have not been identified. Nine months later, the portfolio has delivered the initiatives that had someone assigned on day one. The other ones are still struggling.
Here are the five disciplines I use to close that gap before the year starts.
1. Count hours by role, not heads
Most capacity conversations I walk into are counting people. Forty-one projects, 15 project managers, and a conclusion that the portfolio is tight but workable.
That math is wrong in both directions. A project manager carrying three initiatives and an audit remediation is not a single unit of capacity, and a solution architect shared across six programs is the constraint that will determine your delivery dates.
Count available hours by role. Take the calendar year, subtract leave, subtract the run-the-business load you already know about, and you get a number per role. Put the demand next to it. The first time I did this for a 41-project portfolio, the real capacity was 15. That number changed the conversation in one meeting, because it was no longer an opinion.
2. Put a name on the first 90 days
Every funded initiative needs a named delivery lead for its first 90 days, until the plan is finalized. This is the person who will run the work day to day, not the executive sponsor and not a department. The entry in that column is one human being and a percentage of their time.
Naming a delivery lead forces a trade that the approval meeting avoided. If no line manager will commit a person to the first 90 days of initiative 18, you have learned something about initiative 18 while it is still cheap to learn.
3. Sequence by your scarcest role
Portfolios get sequenced by sponsor priority and start date. Then the work queues behind whichever role everyone needs at once.
Find the two or three roles that appear on the most initiatives. It is rarely the project managers. It is typically data engineers, integration architects, security reviewers, or one business analyst who understands the legacy billing logic. Sequence the portfolio so those roles move through the work in a deliberate order, and tell the sponsors whose initiative sits third in that queue, in December, not when the initiative is already late.
4. Price every reassignment
Mid-year, an executive will ask to borrow one of your delivery people. The request will sound small, and it will be reasonable.
Answer it with a price instead of a yes. Pulling the delivery lead off initiative 7 at 50 percent for six weeks means that the initiative slips its go-live by a quarter and its benefit stream starts in the next fiscal year. Write that down and hand it back. Executives decide differently when the trade is visible, and those who proceed anyway are at least deciding rather than assuming.
5. Publish planned against actual every month
Resource plans decay faster than budgets. Someone goes on leave, a project runs long, and an initiative absorbs 30 percent more of a scarce person than the plan assumed.
Publish planned allocation against actual allocation every month, by role and by person, to the group that approved the plan. Two numbers matter: which people are allocated above 100 percent, and which initiatives are funded with nobody assigned. That second number is the one executives have never seen, and it reopens the staffing conversation in February instead of July.
How do I know if my 2027 portfolio is actually staffed?
Open your approved list and check four things:
- Every initiative has a named delivery lead, a real person, with a committed percentage for its first 90 days.
- Your two scarcest roles have a queue with a stated order.
- Each of those named people adds up to 100 percent or less across all initiatives in which they appear.
- The allocation view is published where your sponsors can see it without asking you.
If all four hold, your plan is staffed. If three hold, you have a list to fix this month. If none hold, you have a funded plan and no staffing model, which is where most portfolios enter January.
Where Smartsheet carries this
Smartsheet Resource Management is built for this problem and runs directly against your Smartsheet projects.
Four features do most of the work:
- Placeholders let you allocate a role to an initiative before you know who will fill it, then swap in the person once a line manager commits one, so your funded-and-unstaffed count is the placeholder count.
- Allocation heatmaps show who is over and under allocated across every project at once.
- Skill-based assignment surfaces the right people when you are filling a role or replacing someone.
- The built-in utilization report gives you planned against actual without anyone rebuilding a view each month.
Scenario Planning handles the reassignment conversation in discipline four. Model the borrow request as a scenario, see which initiatives move, and show the executive the consequence without touching the live plan.
In the engagements where we put this in properly, portfolio visibility improves by around 50 percent.
Do this next week
Take your approved or draft 2027 list and add one column. Call it First 90 Days Delivery Lead, and write a person's name in it, not a department and not the sponsor. Fill in the names you already have, and leave the rest blank.
Then count the blanks and send that number to your sponsor group with one line: these initiatives are funded and nobody has been assigned to them. That number, sent in November, does more for your 2027 delivery than any replanning exercise you run in March.
If you want help building the capacity model and getting Smartsheet Resource Management configured around it, the PMO Value Blueprint is a focused four to eight week engagement that gets it standing, usually with a pilot on one portfolio. Book a 30-minute conversation at calendly.com/pmoevolution.
PS. If portfolio management is on your certification path for 2027, the PfMP Accelerator launches in January. Details at pmoevolution.com/training/pfmp.
