Took over a portfolio of 100+ uncoordinated projects and a failing online shop, and left behind a governed portfolio of 20 and a working e-commerce ecosystem.
📉 100+ → 20
Projects after consolidation
💰 20% lower
Programme costs
🛒 E-commerce ecosystem
Launched on Adobe/Magento
Two problems that turned out to be the same problem.
You cannot fix a shop while a hundred unrelated initiatives quietly consume the capacity to fix it.
Fix the portfolio first, then the product.
Before anything got cancelled, everything got listed. A hundred projects nobody had counted in one place is not a governance problem yet — it is a visibility problem. The count itself changed the conversation.
I introduced lean portfolio management so that funding decisions were made against a shared set of criteria rather than by whoever asked most persistently.
Consolidation from 100+ projects down to 20 was the output, not the goal. The goal was that the remaining 20 could actually be resourced properly.
With capacity freed, we launched the e-commerce ecosystem on Adobe/Magento — replacing the ageing shop rather than patching it.
A hundred projects is a symptom, not a cause. They accumulate because saying no has no forum. Build the forum and the number falls on its own.
Consolidation is a capacity decision, not a cost decision. The 20% saving mattered less than the fact that the surviving projects could finally be staffed to finish.
Replacing beats patching, once you can afford it. The shop was not fixable in its old form. What made replacement possible was not a better business case — it was having freed the capacity to execute one.
