Halfway through the quarter, Finance froze hiring to “protect the budget”; the decision hit a critical product just as usage was spiking. Work piled up in analysis; support tickets climbed; the releases slipped. The teams were not broken; the stream was. Funding lived in project silos with start–stop approvals; the money did not follow the flow of customer value. While the teams can still continue executed; they can't fix the attrition gaps or "fund projects" behavior of the organization. It’s all too common.
What.
Value-stream funding treats the product as a long-lived system that converts capacity into outcomes, not a one-off project to be started and stopped.
We define 3–5 value streams by customer or outcome; give each a stable budget; and govern with lean guardrails rather than heavy stage gates. Guardrails include explicit portfolio WIP limits, small batch commitments, spend bands, risk thresholds, and a rolling-wave review cadence that inspects learning and outcomes monthly while resetting targets quarterly.
Use Throughput Accountingtechniques to see contribution per unit of capacity; elevate decisions from “what did we spend” to “what did the stream learn and deliver”.
So What?
Projects start, but routinely outpace their finishes (organizational ADD); context switching burns capacity; teams wait for money while partially started work ages in queues.
This is local optimization in portfolio clothing. When you fund projects, you create stop–go friction and governance theater; predictability suffers. When you fund streams, you reduce transaction costs, align incentives to outcomes, and make it easier to steer based on real demand and learning.
Now What?
Name the streams: 3–5 product or customer-facing value streams; avoid departmental labels.
Set guardrails: portfolio WIP limit; spend bands per stream; risk thresholds; simple entry and exit criteria for bets.
Adopt rolling reviews: monthly check-ins for learning and capacity balance; quarterly outcome resets tied to OKRs or north-star metrics.
Visualize capacity vs demand: a portfolio Kanban that shows arrivals, WIP, and finished value per stream; highlight decision latency and blocked bets.
Measure contribution, not activity: simple Throughput Accounting view; finished value per time; operating expense as a guardrail; inventory as aged WIP.
Change leadership practices: build Kotter-style coalitions to unblock policy bottlenecks; apply Hamel’s human-centric principles to strip out approvals that add no learning.
Let's Do This!
Fund the stream; let teams flow; outcomes will then follow. When money, governance, and learning move together, you finish more of the right work with less thrash; predictability rises; customers feel progress sooner.
Portfolio agility is not more projects; it is fewer, finished bets flowing through stable teams with clear guardrails and a cadence that rewards learning. Finance has to be a huge part of that, but often they don't know how. Let's teach them!