Turning a $14M portfolio from case-by-case into a system
The difference between managing projects and building the thing that manages them.
Problem
Complex global work arrived without consistent intake, clear ownership, or shared visibility. Prioritization happened case by case, in conversations — which makes a portfolio hard to defend in a budget review, hard to forecast, and impossible to scale without adding people.
What I did
Built the operating layer underneath the work: intake and triage, explicit prioritization criteria, dashboards and incident reporting, budget and vendor management, and the execution cadence connecting all of it — so the portfolio was legible to people who weren't in the room when decisions were made.
Result
One ranked plan replaced case-by-case negotiation, and it held: funded across multiple annual planning cycles, then extended from UCAN into global programs.
What it proves
I don't only manage projects. I build the system through which work gets managed — which is what survives after I leave the team.