How does an executive team know which initiative actually works?
The short answer
An executive team can identify the effect of individual initiatives only if the expected effect was defined at the decision point. Status reports do not answer that question because they show activity, not impact. Where this definition is missing, the issue is not reporting but steering: the portfolio is added up instead of prioritized.
Your projects are running. That is not the comfort it sounds like
In the status meeting, almost everything is green. Fourteen initiatives, fourteen traffic lights, a few amber items with explanations. Afterwards, the executive team often knows no more than before.
Project research even supports the surface picture. Around three quarters of projects report that they meet their business objectives; about one tenth fail completely (Project Management Institute, 2025). These are self-reports by project managers, so they are likely generous, but they still do not show universal failure.
That is the point. If each individual project looks acceptable and the strategy still does not arrive, the missing layer is the portfolio. That is where it becomes clear whether the fourteen initiatives together are the right use of limited resources.
Fewer initiatives create more return
Companies considered leaders in execution concentrate on an average of 3.5 use cases. Others spread themselves across 6.1 and expect 2.1 times the ROI (Boston Consulting Group, 2025, more than 1,800 executives). Fewer initiatives, higher return.
The mechanism is well studied. The more goals a single initiative is supposed to serve, the weaker its perceived instrumentality for each individual goal becomes. A project that promises efficiency, customer satisfaction, sustainability and retention at once appears less powerful for each of them than a project with one clear purpose.
This dilution is not only a resource problem. It sits in the perception of the people involved before the first hour is invested.
Almost nobody reallocates resources across units
Only 30 percent of organizations reallocate resources across the enterprise. Fewer than a quarter achieve sustainable impact from change programs (McKinsey, 2026). In the same picture, 43 percent of executives admit they divested business units too late or not at all.
An analysis of more than 1,600 US companies over fifteen years shows the cost of this inertia. The top third shifted just over half of their capital between business units. The majority gave each unit practically the same share year after year and achieved worse returns for owners (McKinsey Quarterly, 2012).
For project organizations, the concrete equivalent is the absence of a uniform cross-project prioritization method. Without it, negotiation skill and volume decide who gets scarce people.
The level below you sees a different company
The communication problem is usually not frequency. In a survey of 7,600 managers in 262 companies, only just over half of middle managers could name one of their company’s five top priorities. Almost 90 percent nevertheless said leadership communicated the strategy often enough (Harvard Business Review, 2015).
That combination excludes the next town hall as a solution. What is missing is assignment: which active measures belong to which goal?
The same survey gives the harder number: only 9 percent of managers can always rely on commitments from colleagues in other functions. Strategy execution unravels sideways, not downward.
Impact is created at the decision, not in the report
Half of organizations lack real-time access to central project metrics. 22 percent plan initiatives in Excel, 11 percent have no solution at all, and 72 percent spend half a day or more each month manually compiling reports (Wellingtone, 2026).
Yet tooling alone does not explain the gap. People actively seek information when they expect good news and avoid it when they expect bad news. The struggling initiative first drops out of attention, then out of the report.
That is why impact cannot be measured after the fact. If the first question at review is what a running initiative contributes to, the team reconstructs a link instead of steering it.
BizzPlAI is built as a Strategy Execution System so that this assignment stays answerable. For every measure, target, expected value contribution and stop condition are findable from the decision onward. The portfolio can then be ordered by calculated value contribution to strategic goals, not by application sequence or internal volume.
The self-test takes ten minutes: list your active initiatives and assign each one a strategic goal and an impact measure without looking anything up. What you cannot assign is not being steered, no matter how many green traffic lights appeared in the last status meeting.
Common follow-up questions
At what number of parallel initiatives does a portfolio become opaque?
There is no reliable threshold. A better indicator is this: once no one can say from memory which initiative contributes to which strategic goal, the line has been crossed. That happens earlier in flat organizations than in large ones with dedicated portfolio management.
What distinguishes portfolio steering from project management?
Project management asks whether an initiative is on time, on budget and within scope. Portfolio steering asks whether it is still the right use of resources compared with all other initiatives. A project can run cleanly and still be the wrong investment.
Do initiatives have to be stopped to steer a portfolio?
Not necessarily. The first step is to assign every active initiative to a goal and an impact measure. In practice, duplicates and initiatives without a clear strategic link then become visible by themselves.
Sources
- Pulse of the Profession 2025 - Boosting Business AcumenProject Management Institute, 2025
- Closing the AI Impact GapBoston Consulting Group, 2025
- The State of Organizations 2026McKinsey & Company, 2026
- How to put your money where your strategy isMcKinsey Quarterly (Stephen Hall, Dan Lovallo, Reinier Musters), 2012
- Why Strategy Execution Unravels - and What to Do About ItHarvard Business Review (Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes, Charles Sull), 2015
- The State of Project Management Report 2026Wellingtone, 2026
See how strategy arrives.
In 30 minutes, we show you how to steer your initiatives instead of merely managing them.