Why Smarter Delivery Beats Bigger
Spend: Experiment at the Dutch
Ministry of Defense
How to cut lead times by 30% and deliver
on time at a $1B+ defense program
In today’s geopolitical climate, defense programs are under mounting pressure to deliver faster and more effectively. While budgets are exploding, the real bottleneck has shifted: it’s no longer about funding, but about the limited availability of skilled resources. The challenge now is not how much can be spent, but how to make the best use of the people already in place.
To explore a new approach, we partnered with a $1B+ defense program run by the Dutch Ministry of Defense and conducted an experiment using Epicflow on the first batch of projects within a multi-year program. The results were compelling: lead times could be cut by over 30%, and due date performance improved by up to 300% —without increasing headcount.
These results confirmed that prioritizing based on resource constraints, not just budgets, can dramatically improve performance. However, the broader organizational mindset is still catching up. Many stakeholders continue to operate under the long-standing belief that budget is the primary constraint. Shifting this thinking—along with the culture, habits, and deeply embedded processes that support it—is a significant challenge, and this transformation is still very much in progress.
Nevertheless, the experiment was widely regarded as a major success across the MOD. The early impact was so meaningful that we chose not to wait for the full implementation to be complete before sharing these insights. The urgency of the global defense context, combined with the potential for meaningful improvement, made it clear that these learnings are worth sharing now.
The challenges faced by the Dutch MOD
- Challenge 1. Too much work in progress.
- There were hundreds of projects running simultaneously. All the projects were considered to be equally important, so they were executed at the same time.
- Challenge 2. No clear prioritization
- In a time of tight defense budgets, projects were approved based on available funding rather than business value or resource availability. But today, with budgets rising, resources—not money—have become the limiting factor. The organization lacked a way to prioritize effectively in this new reality.
- Challenge 3. Poor resource management.
- The management neglected resource constraints and focused on the financial side of projects. As a result of ineffective allocation and management of available resources, they couldn’t complete the required scope of work, which led to overload and delays.
- Challenge 4: Finance-driven prioritization over resource constraints
- Project decisions were based primarily on available budgets, without clear prioritization mechanisms or consideration of resource constraints. Projects were launched because funding was available, not because they delivered the most business value or were aligned with resource capacity. This led to unmanageable workloads, delays, and failure to complete projects without extra resources.
- Challenge 5. Overloaded employees.
- Employees were involved in all these numerous projects at the same time. What is more, some team members were assigned to large tasks that required more than 1200 hours to be completed. Overloaded team members hampered their colleagues’ work, which caused additional delays in other projects.
- Challenge 6. Ineffective capacity planning.
- Monthly capacity planning was too detailed and not flexible. Endless replanning and resource allocation meetings made the whole planning cycle last for 3 months: if there was a change or a delay in one project, it affected other projects in the pipeline due to resource dependencies that they could not oversee. At the same time, they started new projects with no regard for people’s capacity. All these factors led to tremendous overhead.
- Challenge 7. Many delayed projects.
- As a result of people’s overload, a large number of projects in execution, and ineffective capacity planning, the vast majority of projects were about to be completed with significant delays—the analysis performed by Epicflow showed 316 days delayed. Getting the job done seemed impossible without assigning extra resources.
Barriers to progress:
The limiting beliefs prevailing in the MOD
The above-mentioned challenges were, to a large extent, a product of limiting beliefs and misconceptions that were prevalent in the organization and kept it from moving forward:
- “We can start a new project if we have money for its execution”.
- “Everything is important”.
“Every project must start immediately, as we can’t afford delays”. - “We can’t assign multiple resources to big tasks to reduce lead time because we don’t have extra capacity”.
- “We aren’t entitled to prioritize projects”.
- “We’ve always done it this way”.
- Too many bosses but no clear leadership.
Why Epicflow?
But why should the MOD use a new system like Epicflow?
Epicflow helps organizations manage their complex multi-project environments (project portfolios) effectively and utilize shared resources efficiently.
- Data-driven work prioritization: preventing overload and increasing productivity.
- Intelligent resource management: resource allocation based on resource capacity, availability, and skills; capacity planning, workload balancing.
- Detecting bottlenecks that hamper progress: ensuring seamless work on projects, preventing delays.
- Overcoming the uncertainty of decision-making: playing different scenarios and analyzing their impact on the workflow
- Providing comprehensive visibility into all project processes and resource-related data.
- Flexibility and adaptability to changes.
- A high level of data security which is one of the top priorities for government organizations.
In contrast, Epicflow automatically identified all bottlenecks and their causes in just
two weeks. After that, we could run scenarios and make further steps to improve
the situation.
What we did to address the challenges
Project visualization to get the project environment under control
Upon entering the required data into the system (projects and resources’ available capacity), Epicflow presented a detailed overview of the whole project environment with the feasibility
of milestones. The management got a clear understanding of the state of their project portfolio.
Setting project priorities to optimize resource allocatio
The second thing to do was to set business values for projects in the portfolio. As resource capacity was limited, prioritization was the key to efficient resource allocation and productive work on the most essential projects.
Detecting bottlenecks to know what hampers performance
The analysis of Epicflow’s graphs has made it possible to identify 15 FTE overload in the resource group of 60 engineers, which hampered the workflow and caused delays in other projects that used these resources. The system also showed projects and tasks that were overloading the resource group.
Assigning more employees to extra-large tasks in the critical path
Project prioritization allowed us to free up resources’ capacity and assign them to tasks in the critical path as well as to extra-large tasks (that exceeded 1,200 hours). This made it possible to complete these projects much earlier than expected.
Sequencing projects based on resource constraints
Epicflow’s AI-powered Project Staggering feature prompted us how to reorganize the project environment to be able to complete the highest-priority projects on time. In particular, this feature helps schedule projects in line with the availability of constrained resources.
So, projects with lower business value were postponed until there was available capacity again.
As a result, we prevented resource overload and delays, and the predicted results speak for themselves: the expected performance has increased from 24% stated by the customer to 77%. What is more, according to Epicflow’s forecasts, they can potentially increase it to 93%, which marks a huge gain in performance.
The interim results:
Improved project performance and reduced lead time
The experiment clearly demonstrated that major improvements are possible even without expanding the workforce. By using Epicflow to prioritize work and manage capacity based on actual resource availability, the MOD has already achieved significant progress:
- The available resources are assigned to projects with the highest business value.
- Lower-priority projects are temporarily postponed until constrained resources
become available. - Employees have balanced workloads, leading to productivity and engagement.
- Project lead times can be reduced by over 30%, according to the experimental outcomes.
- The MOD can now deliver the entire portfolio without adding extra resources.
- The expected due date performance has grown from 24% to 77%, with the potential
to increase it to 93%. - The top 50% of projects—those with the highest business value—can be delivered
up to 424 days earlier than originally planned.
Despite these strong results, adopting a new way of working at scale is never straightforward. As with many large organizations, the transition requires shifts not only in tools but also in mindset, processes, and leadership alignment.
Epicflow remains a proven enabler of that change, and the experiment is still widely seen as a success—demonstrating what’s possible when resource constraints are addressed intelligently. We remain engaged and ready to support the next phase of the transformation.
Case author: Albert Ponsteen, Co-founder of Epicflow and PhD in Management Sciences focused on resource allocation in multi-project environments, Dr. Ponsteen has over 20 years of experience improving performance in complex, resource-constrained organizations.
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Snatch an opportunity to talk to our seasoned experts, researchers, and co-founders of Epicflow:
Albert Ponsteen and Jan Willem Tromp have huge experience in project and resource management and have been consulting organizations in the defense and aerospace industry for more than 5 years.