How much is the chaos costing you?

Companies put a number on everything. Project budgets, contractors, software licences, full-time equivalents, cost overruns. But there's one number no one ever calculates: how much it costs to be badly organised.

The CRM project that was meant to take 6 months and is now at 18, with a team of 4 people tied up on it for a full year longer than planned — roughly 400,000 euros of capacity burned that produced not a single extra deliverable. The 5 back-end developers each working on 8 projects in parallel instead of 3, who, mechanically, spend more time re-orienting themselves between topics than writing code. The quarterly prioritisation meeting where 12 directors spend half a day defending their projects and leave with the exact same list they walked in with — meeting cost: 6,000 euros of combined time, value produced: zero decisions. The 35 projects launched in January of which only 12 will actually ship by December; the other 23 will have consumed time, energy and bandwidth without delivering anything. What does that add up to? 200,000 euros? 500,000? A million? Nobody knows, because nobody does the maths.

That cost is colossal. The data proves it. But it stays invisible because no one puts it together. And as long as it's invisible, nobody moves. And I'm not talking about ground-level time tracking — the kind where everyone logs their hours from memory at 5pm on Friday, where the numbers are wrong and everyone knows it: the manager, the PMO, the CFO, everyone. That kind of time tracking measures nothing. It reassures. It produces dashboards nobody challenges because nobody believes them. What I'm talking about is something far simpler and far more brutal: look at what you promised to deliver, look at what you actually delivered, and calculate the gap. Not in logged hours. In results.

1 - Waste has a price. We know it. We just don't look at it.

According to the PMI (Pulse of the Profession, 2018), organisations waste an average of 9.9% of every dollar invested because of poor project performance. That's 97 million dollars lost for every billion spent. Put in terms of time, that works out to roughly 1 million dollars wasted every 20 seconds worldwide.

In 2020, the same PMI raised that figure to 11.4% of investment lost. And organisations that underestimate project management as a strategic lever see 67% more projects fail than the rest.

The most striking part: organisations that invest in proven delivery-management practices waste 28 times less than those that don't.

So yes, let's be honest: the PMI has an interest in publishing these numbers. It sells certifications, training courses and conferences. That's their business, and that's fine.

The 28x figure is probably an extreme case. But even if you divide it by 4. Even if, in your organisation, it's "only" a factor of 6 or 7. Take your annual project budget. Apply 10% waste. On a 30-million portfolio, that's 3 million going up in smoke. If better delivery management divides that waste by 6, you go from 3 million lost to 500,000. That's 2.5 million recovered. Every year. Year after year.

Imagine what you'd do with 2.5 million of recovered capacity. And we're talking about a factor of 6, not 28.

2 - The four haemorrhages nobody measures

Context switching: your teams are working at 60% without knowing it

When someone works on too many projects in parallel, they don't work more — they work less well. The American Psychological Association has shown that context switching can eat up to 40% of a person's productive time. 40%. Over an 8-hour day, that's 3.2 hours lost — not to coffee breaks, but to the cognitive re-orientation between topics that have nothing to do with each other. McKinsey estimates, on top of that, that employees spend up to 20% of their week looking for information or chasing colleagues for updates. That's a full day every week. And a study from the University of California, Irvine showed that it takes 25 minutes on average to regain your focus after a single interruption.

Do the maths for a team of 20 people spread across 8 projects in parallel. Reclaiming just one hour of focus per person per day across that team is 500 hours a month — the equivalent of 4 to 5 full-time employees. For free. Just by cutting the number of things running in parallel. Looking for budget to hire? Start by putting an end to wasting the capacity you already have.

The project that drags on: 12 months of capacity gone up in smoke

A project scoped for six months that takes eighteen isn't just "a delay". It's twelve months of capacity tied up producing no value. Concretely: 3 full-time people for 12 months too many, at an average loaded cost of 80,000 euros a year, adds up to 240,000 euros. For a single project. Multiply that by the number of projects slipping in your portfolio. And add the indirect costs: teams waiting on deliverables are blocked, the business need that justified the project may have shifted or vanished, and the contractors kept on "in the meantime" who keep billing every month.

The PMI reports that only 34% of projects are delivered on time and on budget. Which means two thirds of your portfolio consume more capacity than planned. And that overconsumption — no one puts a cost on it. It's endured as though it were inevitable.

Non-decision: the most expensive and most invisible cost

This is the most insidious one. The prioritisation meeting that settles nothing. The exec committee leaving with 35 "priority" projects instead of 12. The trade-off pushed back "to the next committee". Every week without a decision means teams carrying on working on everything at 30% instead of delivering something at 100%.

Take a team of 10 people. Loaded payroll cost: around 800,000 euros a year. If that team works on 15 projects instead of 5 because no one made the call, and its real productivity drops by 40% because of context switching, that's 320,000 euros of productive capacity that vanishes. Per year. For a single team. And the cause isn't a technical problem — it's a meeting that failed to produce a decision.

No tracking of the gains: a system that never learns

You invest hundreds of thousands of euros in a project. You deliver it. And then? Nothing. No one comes back to check whether the gains promised at scoping — the famous ROI of the business case — actually materialised. Not at three months. Not at six months. Never.

The result: you don't know whether what you delivered was worth it. You can't compare forecasts against actual results. You can't learn. And at the next budget cycle, you start from scratch, with the same biases, the same over-estimates, the same unverifiable promises. It's a system with no feedback loop. And a system without feedback doesn't improve — it repeats itself. Imagine a salesperson who never found out whether their clients renewed. Or a CFO who never checked whether the revenue forecasts came true. We'd find that absurd. And yet that's exactly what we do with projects.

3 - Why no one wants to look

This isn't a data problem. The data exists. The number of active projects per team is sitting in your tracking tool. The number of projects delivered versus launched can be worked out in ten minutes. The real workload of teams — managers know it, even if they write it down nowhere.

The problem is that putting it all together holds up a mirror to the organisation. And that mirror doesn't say "the teams are bad". It says "the system produces waste". It says the exec committee launches too many things. That no one has the mandate to say no. That continuous improvement is treated as housekeeping, not as an investment.

I've seen this at clients: the numbers had been on display for years. The number of projects in progress, the number of projects delivered. But no one ever put them side by side. The day someone simply showed the ratio — we take in 40 projects a year, we deliver 12 — the message changed completely. Not the numbers.

The message. Because until then, progress was shown project by project. And project by project, it always looks manageable. It's the whole-portfolio picture that's unbearable.

And when a CEO finally becomes aware of the problem, the first reflex is almost always the same: "OK, we'll run an audit. I want to know what each person does with their days."

Every employee is asked to track their activities for two weeks. Out comes a table with percentages by person, by project, by task type. And yes, you get a snapshot. For the current month, it's often eye-opening: you see that a given architect spends 40% of their time in scoping meetings for projects that will never start, or that a given data team is called on by 11 different projects when it can only absorb 4.

It's useful. Genuinely. But that snapshot has a shelf life of one month. Beyond that, it tells you nothing. Not whether you need to hire 3 people or 8. Not whether the transformation programme will make it into Q3. Not which projects to accept at the next budget committee. And above all, it doesn't hold up over time. Redoing it every month is heavy. At the individual level over six months, it's unmanageable — too much granularity, too much data entry, quality collapses by the second cycle. And even with a perfect snapshot, you know where people spend their time — but you still don't know whether you can meet your commitments for the quarter.

The natural temptation that follows is to think: "OK, if I track carefully at the individual level for a few months, I'll be able to build my scenarios on top of it." In practice, it doesn't work.

Because a scenario isn't "is Jean-Pierre available in Q3". It's "can the data team absorb 3 extra deliverables in Q3 if the ERP programme slips by 4 weeks". That's reasoning at the level of the skill group and the intermediate deliverable, not the individual.

At the individual level, you have too many variables — holidays, departures, new hires, sick leave. Projected over a quarter, it's noise. Over two quarters, it's fiction. At the team level — a group of 6 to 12 people sharing a homogeneous skill set — those variations smooth out. The group's capacity stays stable from one quarter to the next. And it's that stability that makes the scenario possible.

And the other key level is the intermediate deliverable — not the project. "The ERP project" tells you nothing about what will consume which team and when. "The supplier-data migration deliverable, owned by the data team, in Q3" — that's a unit you can steer. Concrete, sizeable, movable.

Team × intermediate deliverable × quarter. That's the right triptych. A model you can maintain over time without it taking over your life. And the trap is believing you need perfect data to start. It's the opposite. An imperfect model that runs every quarter beats a perfect model you can never keep up.

5 — Until you have this number, you can't change anything

This is why CIOs can't secure a budget to improve their own operation. Why CIO Offices can't hire a right hand. Why continuous improvement is seen as Opex, a cost line, and not as an investment with a return.

Because we've never put a number on what the status quo costs.

When a CIO asks for a steering tool, an extra PMO role, or time to restructure their governance, the answer is almost always: "We don't have the budget." But no one looks at how much it costs not to do it. How much the 12 months of delay on the transformation programme cost. How much the turnover of burned-out project managers costs. How much it costs that 60% of the planned deliverables never ship.

If the cost of inefficiency were on the table — a real number, in euros, visible, set against the cost of the solution — the conversation would be radically different. It would no longer be "can we afford to invest in delivery management?" It would be "can we afford not to?"

That's the starting point. Before the quarter plan, before the scenario-building, before AI, before the tools, there's that moment when someone puts the real number on the table. And when the exec committee realises it's already paying the price. Just without knowing it.

Companies put a number on everything. Except the price of their own disorganisation. And it's precisely that number that unlocks everything else.

Refuse the status quo. Let's talk: bertran@airsaas.io

This article first appeared in my LinkedIn newsletter Il était une fois un CODIR, where every fortnight I share situations lived through in the executive committee.