Doing more with less: portfolio thinking for managers juggling too many projects
Doing more with less: portfolio thinking for managers juggling too many projects
Wednesday, 26 August 2026
Key Takeaways
- Workload management is a persistent theme in Australian Public Service (APS) Employee Census results, with agencies across the Commonwealth identifying it as a priority action area year after year.
- The problem for most managers is not a lack of effort but the absence of a system for making competing demands visible and negotiable.
- Australia’s documented shortage of experienced project managers means those managing project loads in public sector agencies are often doing so without formal training in prioritisation or portfolio methods.
- Portfolio thinking, applied at the team level, is a practical framework any manager can use without a dedicated program management office (PMO) or bespoke technology.
The evidence is clear, public sector managers across Australia are running too many projects at once. This is not a new observation, and it is not unique to any single agency or jurisdiction. It is a structural condition that shows up reliably in workforce data and in the day-to-day experience of the managers and executives who are expected to deliver across multiple simultaneous workstreams with teams that have not grown to match the demand. Portfolio thinking offers a practical way to manage that condition more deliberately, and it is more accessible than many managers assume.
What the data shows
The 2025 APS Employee Census results are consistent with prior years in identifying workload management as a persistent challenge. Across agencies, action plans responding to census findings have listed workload management as a focus area, with agencies committing to conduct regular business and workforce planning to ensure the right work is prioritised and key resources are allocated appropriately. That this commitment recurs in successive action plans points to the structural nature of the problem rather than any failure of individual effort.
The workload pressure sits within a broader skills context. Among the top 20 occupations facing skills shortages in Australia, according to Jobs and Skills Australia data, are experienced project managers. Australia’s public sector news site, The Mandarin identified a critical shortage of digitally enabled project managers needed for large government and defence initiatives. Furthermore, SEEK currently lists more than 22,500 project management roles nationally, with forecast growth of over 10 per cent in the next five years. The supply-demand gap means that many of the people carrying the heaviest project loads in the public sector are doing so without formal grounding in how to manage a portfolio of competing demands.
Standard responses are not enough
The typical organisational response to manager overload is time management training, better task tracking tools, or an appeal to work smarter rather than harder. These responses have value at the margins, but they do not address the structural problem. A manager with twelve active workstreams who learns to use a task board more effectively still has twelve active workstreams. The tool improves visibility of the problem, but it does not resolve it.
What most managers lack is a way to make trade-offs visible and legitimate. In many agencies, raising the question of capacity when a new project is assigned is interpreted as reluctance rather than professional judgement. The result is that managers absorb demand rather than negotiating it, and the costs of that absorption accumulate quietly across work quality, staff wellbeing and eventually delivery outcomes.
What portfolio thinking actually means for a manager
Portfolio thinking, at the strategic level, is a formal discipline with dedicated governance and program management office. At the team level, the same core logic applies without requiring any of that infrastructure.
In practice, it means three things. First, making the full portfolio visible: mapping every active and pending workstream with an honest estimate of the time and attention each genuinely requires from the manager and the team. Second, applying a deliberate prioritisation lens: which workstreams are directly aligned to the team’s core accountability, which are legacy commitments that could be renegotiated, and which are genuinely urgent versus simply visible. Third, protecting capacity: treating a portion of the team’s time as reserved for quality delivery on the highest-priority work, rather than spreading effort uniformly across everything and producing average outcomes on all of it.
None of these steps require a new system or technology. They require executives who are willing to make the invisible visible: to name the trade-offs explicitly rather than absorbing them silently, and to start the conversations that allow better choices to be made at the right level.
The upward conversation
Portfolio thinking also changes the nature of the conversation a manager has with their senior leadership. A manager who presents their team’s workload as a mapped portfolio, with honest assessments of capacity constraints and the trade-offs required to maintain quality, gives their manager the information needed to make better resourcing and sequencing decisions.
This is a skill that needs to be developed, not assumed. It requires the ability to frame capacity in a way that is credible and constructive, to articulate trade-offs without appearing to avoid accountability, and to negotiate priorities while maintaining the trust of both the team and the organisation.
Starting where you are
Portfolio thinking at the team level does not require a methodology change or a formal certification before it can begin. It requires a manager who is willing to invest the time to map their team’s actual workload, identify where effort is being spread too thin to produce quality outcomes, and bring that picture to the conversations where priorities are set.
For managers who want to build that capability more systematically, training in project management principles, prioritisation frameworks, and stakeholder negotiation provides the conceptual grounding that makes those conversations more effective. Doing more with less is not ultimately a question of effort. Australian public sector managers are not under-performing; they are under-supported with methods for making deliberate choices about where that effort goes. Portfolio thinking is what makes that possible.
About the Author
Paul Vorbach is the Managing Director of AcademyGlobal, a Sydney-based capability development firm established in 2004 and the CIPS Centre of Excellence for ANZ. Since 2005, Paul has trained contract management, procurement and supply chain professionals across over twenty centuries in five continents. He is Vice President of the Institute of Strategic Risk Management (ISRM) ANZ, Treasurer of the Society of Risk Analysis (SRA) ANZ, and Adjunct Faculty at the Australian Graduate School of Management (AGSM) at the University of New South Wales.
AcademyGlobal partners with public sector, private sector, and not-for-profit organisations to build the capability that underpins sustainable delivery performance, and is the Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply (CIPS) Centre of Excellence for Australia, New Zealand and Asia.