About Flow Economics
Flow Economics helps organizations decide which work to prioritize, when to commit scarce resources, and how those choices affect portfolio value.
The Project Illusion
Many organizations are trapped in the Project Illusion: the belief that if each project is well planned, well governed and delivered successfully, the organization will perform well.
In practice, portfolio performance depends on how projects interact as they compete for shared, constrained resources. A decision that benefits one project can delay another or reduce the value of the portfolio as a whole. When those dependencies and constraints are invisible, the illusion persists.
What Flow Economics does
It shifts the focus from managing projects individually to managing portfolios as economic systems. That means answering questions no single project plan can: which project your scarcest specialist should work on first, what a week's delay on the others actually costs, and which new work to hold back until there is capacity to finish it.
Flow Economics is agnostic of delivery methodology. However teams choose to deliver, it addresses the portfolio decisions above them: what gets prioritized, when, and why. The thinking was developed with Stephen Devaux, Jan Willem Tromp and Oleksii Mikhalevich, and is set out in the forthcoming book Flow Economics: The Missing Layer Between Strategy and Delivery.
Who we are
Ben Rawson
Founder
During eighteen years in defense test and evaluation, Ben saw well-managed projects compete for the same specialists, ranges and facilities. Improving individual project plans could only take them so far; the biggest gains came from organizing work around the constraints shared across the portfolio. That experience shaped Flow Economics. For the last five years he has taught it to PMO leaders and senior executives. He is co-author of the book.
Albert Ponsteen
Co-author
Albert's PhD research (Open Universiteit, 2022) looked at how organizations allocate scarce people across many projects at once, combining scheduling rules with human judgment. He has spent more than 25 years solving that problem in practice, and his essays on this site, such as The Borrowed Buffer, draw on both. He is co-author of the book.
Talk to us
If you lead a PMO, run a portfolio, or are accountable for delivery across a shared resource pool, get in touch or find us on LinkedIn.
Where schedule becomes economics.