Gaps
Eleven gaps, seen repeatedly.
These are not hypotheses. They are the failure patterns that recur across enterprise portfolios inside large organisations — in the demand tier, in governance, and in the market that sells the fix. The method exists because of them.
Group A
In the demand tier
Five gaps that all share one cause: nothing stands between an ask and the plan.
SIX DOORS IN · NO GATE
GAP 01
Demand arrives through many doors, and none of them is a gate.
How it shows up. A steering committee, a corridor conversation, a board paper someone has already promised, an escalation, an inherited plan. Each route is legitimate on its own terms. None of them compares the ask against anything else.
What it costs. Work enters the plan without ever being ranked against the work it displaces. Nobody can point to the moment it was chosen, because there wasn't one.
GAP 02
Capacity is asserted rather than measured.
How it shows up. A number is agreed in a planning session and then quoted back all year. It is rarely reconciled against who is actually available, for how long, at what allocation.
What it costs. The plan is committed against capacity that does not exist. The overrun is discovered in delivery, where it is expensive, rather than in planning, where it is free.
GAP 03
The plan is a negotiation, not a decision.
How it shows up. What survives is what its sponsor defended most effectively, not what scored best against declared criteria. Seniority substitutes for evidence.
What it costs. The portfolio optimises for internal influence rather than value. The same argument is had every quarter because nothing was ever actually settled.
GAP 04
No record of what earned a place in the plan.
How it shows up. Ask why a programme is in this year's portfolio and you get a name, a date, or a shrug — rarely a business case anyone can produce.
What it costs. Nothing can be defended when it is challenged, and nothing can be stopped when it should be, because there is no baseline to measure against.
GAP 05
No record of what proved it deserved to stay.
How it shows up. Approval is a one-time event. Once in the plan, work is reviewed for progress, not for whether it still deserves the slot.
What it costs. Zombie programmes. Investment continues because stopping requires a decision nobody is positioned to make.
The common thread
Every one of these is a missing record, not a missing process.
Organisations rarely lack governance. They lack a decision anyone can produce afterwards — which is the only thing that makes governance checkable.
Group B
In governance itself
Four gaps about independence — who reviews, who signs, and whether either can produce an inconvenient answer.
GAP 06
Governance exists as a document rather than a gate something can fail.
How it shows up. A framework is written, circulated and approved. Stages have names. In practice no piece of work has ever been stopped at one of them.
What it costs. The cost of governance is paid — the meetings, the packs, the templates — without the benefit. A control that cannot fail anything is a reporting overhead.
GAP 07
Sponsors mark their own homework.
How it shows up. The person who wants the work also chairs the review of the work, approves its business case, and reports its status.
What it costs. Independence is structurally impossible, however capable and well-intentioned everyone involved is. It is a conflict of position, not of character.
GAP 10
Designing, building and reviewing the same work is a structural conflict.
How it shows up. One organisation produces the design, implements it, and signs off that it was done correctly.
What it costs. The review cannot be adversarial, because the reviewer carries the cost of finding something. This applies to this practice too — which is why critical designs here are challenged from outside before they are signed, and the challenge is kept.
GAP 11
Eight disciplines, seven handoffs, and the reasoning gets dropped in the gaps.
How it shows up. Strategy hands to business analysis, which hands to process engineering, which hands to development. Each handoff is a document. None of them carries the reasoning that produced it.
What it costs. By the time something is built, the constraint that shaped the original decision has been lost. The build is faithful to the spec and wrong about the problem.
Group C
In the market that sells the fix
Two gaps that explain why the first nine persist despite an industry built to solve them.
Their gate decides how. Not whether. That distinction is the whole argument, and it is why this practice sits above a delivery flow rather than inside one.
WHERE THE GATES SIT
Gates on both sides of the plan. The left-hand ones decide whether.
GAP 08
The tooling can govern demand. It is rarely switched on.
How it shows up. Portfolio and demand modules ship with the major platforms. The capability exists and is largely unused.
What it costs. Organisations buy the means to say no and then decline to use it, because using it means telling a sponsor no. The gap is not capability — it is the willingness to run it.
GAP 09
An integrator's gate governs work that is already chosen.
How it shows up. The major firms sell governed delivery, and it is real. But a firm engaged to deliver has no mandate to reopen what was chosen before it arrived.
What it costs. The most expensive decision in the portfolio — what to do at all — sits outside the scope of the governance you bought.
Start here
Start with the portfolio you already have.
Bring the register, the capacity position and the last few quarters of decisions. The first conversation is a read of which of these eleven are live in your portfolio.