Adoption is a message: taking portfolio visibility from 48 to 90 percent

Two earlier improvement efforts had not taken hold before I arrived. Adoption of the portfolio management system sat at 48 percent, which meant that for roughly half of a global portfolio of more than 400 projects, leadership had no reliable view of risk, slippage, or resource constraints. The deployment teams were politely skeptical that a third attempt would go differently.

The situation

The organization ran technology deployments in fulfillment centers worldwide, a 450 person organization in which about 200 project managers were responsible for entries in Clarity Project Portfolio Management, the designated single source of truth. The entries that did exist were often incomplete. Earlier materials had drifted from how the program actually worked, which had eroded confidence in the discipline itself. I was given eight months to reach 90 percent adoption. The harder task underneath was earning back credibility before asking anyone to change.

What I did

I deliberately did not lead with an adoption push, because that approach had been tried twice already. I learned the tool hands-on, shadowed project managers through their real workflows, and then surveyed all 200 of the system’s users. Half responded, which was itself a signal: people will engage if you ask them seriously.

The findings were sharper than I expected. 42 percent were not using the system as their primary tool. 60 percent found it inflexible and hard to navigate. More than 70 percent had fewer than ten hours of training on it. And the most telling pattern was an inverse relationship: the features most critical to portfolio decisions, resource management above all, were the ones rated hardest to use, while status reporting, the least decision-relevant feature, was rated easiest. Project managers were dutifully filing status in the system and doing their real work in spreadsheets and other tools.

That reframed everything. This was not a discipline problem or a training problem. It was a user experience and operating model problem. The system was being used for what it was easy to use for, not for what the organization needed from it. So we worked the friction layer by layer. Data input standards fixed accuracy at the source. I built and delivered the training myself, around the workflows the shadowing had surfaced rather than generic tool walkthroughs, because materials built from real workflows were how confidence would be rebuilt. Escalation and communication plans made clear what good looked like and why leadership cared. And two-way integrations with adjacent systems meant project managers stopped double-entering data they already captured elsewhere.

What happened

Adoption reached 90 percent in six months, two months ahead of the eight month commitment, with data completeness and accuracy following the curve up. Leadership could finally see risk across the whole portfolio in time to act on it. And it held, because the work had answered why people were not using the tool rather than insisting harder that they should.