Your annual plan assumes unlimited people. Next year will not.
Your plan for next year is being made now.
In most annual plans, every project has a business case, a budget and a date, while the people who must deliver it are one number: headcount. In under two minutes you see what that costs, and what Epicflow does about it. Epicflow is a portfolio planning tool that plans next year on the people you really have.
On a sample portfolio of late projects and overloaded teams, a $330,000 loss became nearly $1.3 million of profit. Nothing about the work changed. The decisions did.
These organisations have chosen Epicflow to optimise their business.
You leave money on the table when projects, people and cash flow are managed apart.
Four things decide what next year earns: your bottleneck, what your people can really deliver, what each project is worth, and what every date costs or brings in. Managed one by one, each looks under control, and the money is lost between them. Say next year asks more of your scarcest people than they have:
Hire more people, but the specialist you need is the one nobody can hire.
Or delay a project, and the customer walks away.
Or do neither, and instead of one project, all of them finish late.
The same people produce more money when projects, people and cash flow are managed as one.
Four things your annual plan needs
Each of them exists somewhere in the market. Annual portfolio planning needs all four at once, on the same numbers: only then can you price each way out before you sign.
Bottleneck management
You see which people and skills every project waits for, across the whole portfolio, and when they overload, before you commit next year to them.
Bottom lineTheir hours set what the whole portfolio delivers, so this is where an hour is worth most.
A forecast of what your people will really deliver
Every project and every team, on real capacity. Capacity planning across the portfolio, not per project. You plan with the dates your people can actually achieve.
Bottom lineYou promise dates you can keep, and see late projects and their cost while there is still time to act.
Your KPIs in one business value
You steer on several KPIs at once, such as revenue, margin and strategic goals, and they carry different weights. The Epicflow Portfolio Optimiser (EPO) weighs them into one business value per project and ranks your projects by the value they bring for every hour of your bottleneck.
Bottom lineYour scarcest hours go to the work that earns most.
A price on every date
What is each project worth, when does the money come in, and what will it still cost? RRI (Return on Remaining Investment) for every project, drag cost for every task (what it costs when it holds its project up) and cash flow for every milestone answer that, all on the same forecast.
Bottom lineThe board and the shop floor look at the same money.
Only Epicflow combines all four: your portfolio as one investment
AI finds the most valuable plan. You decide.
Epicflow treats every project as an investment, and your whole portfolio as one. You set the target: maximum profit, every mandatory deadline met, or the best cash flow. Its AI then optimises the portfolio as a whole: every project, every milestone and how they depend on each other, every resource on the right task at the right moment, with your bonuses, penalties and KPIs taken into account. That is millions of combinations. The AI searches them, with EPO's business value as the yardstick, and selects the most valuable plan: which projects to finish first, which to pause, and when extra people pay for themselves.
We run it for you as PMO as a Service and deliver the plan as a What-If Analysis, so nothing live changes until you decide.
See it on a sample portfolio: a $330,000 loss became nearly $1.3 million of profit, with every project on time.
Stephen Devaux's method puts a price on time. He calls it the Moneyball game. We call it Moneyball for project management.
According to Devaux, Epicflow is the first in the world to implement it for an entire portfolio.
What we do with your draft plan
Send us the basics: one row per department (people and hourly rate) and one row per project (dates, hours to go, contract value, and what a week early or late is worth). No detailed plans; a spreadsheet is enough. Anonymise the names, keep the real figures. See the example.
Then you decide, before you sign. Approving an investment and releasing it into execution are separate decisions, and Epicflow shows you when each project should start.
Once the year starts, Epicflow keeps the plan alive: the hours your teams report (from Jira, for example) update the forecast, so problems show up while there is still time to solve them.
We show you, on your own portfolio:
- which teams are next year's bottleneck, and when they overload;
- which projects will be late, and what each delay costs;
- the most valuable plan, and what it takes.
Questions about annual portfolio planning with Epicflow
What is annual portfolio planning?
Annual portfolio planning is deciding which projects your organisation runs next year, when each one starts, and what the people and money behind them can really deliver. It usually runs alongside the annual operating plan: finance sets the budget, every project brings a business case and a date, and capacity is one headcount figure per department. Headcount does not show which specialists every project needs at the same time, and that is where next year's plan breaks. Planning the portfolio on real capacity means testing the draft against your bottleneck before you sign: which projects will be late, what each delay costs, and which order earns most. That is the test Epicflow runs on your draft plan.
How is Epicflow different from other portfolio planning tools?
Portfolio planning tools in project management usually do one of two jobs. Capacity planning shows each team's load against its capacity. Project portfolio management keeps the portfolio's records: business cases, budgets, status and approvals. Epicflow does both (see our capacity planning software and project portfolio management software pages), and adds what an annual plan depends on: when every project will really finish given everything else your shared people have on, what that date earns or costs, and which plan is worth most. Its AI then searches for the most valuable plan, so the plan you sign is one your people can deliver.
We already have a portfolio tool. Why Epicflow?
Because in almost every organisation, planning, people and money live apart. Projects report on delivery, HR on headcount and finance on the money, each in its own system, and each looks under control. As the videos show, that is where the money is lost: they only meet in separate spreadsheets and separate conversations. Most tools cover one of them well. Epicflow combines all four things above in one model of your whole portfolio: bottleneck management, a forecast of what your people will really deliver, your KPIs in one business value and a price on every date. That is why the same people produce more money. Keep your current tool for what it does well, and run your annual plan in Epicflow.
How do we decide which projects to delay or drop?
Not by score, and never one project at a time. A project has to fit the whole portfolio, so Epicflow weighs it on the four ingredients at once. Is there capacity at the bottleneck when the project needs it? What is its business value for every bottleneck hour (EPO)? What does it still bring in for every euro left to spend (RRI)? And what does a delay do to its drag cost, its bonuses and penalties, and your cash flow? Three things are easy to miss. A project that is far along can have a higher RRI than a new one with a better business case, because the money already spent no longer counts. Dropping a project only helps if it frees the bottleneck; anywhere else it frees nothing. And enabling work may earn nothing itself, yet hold up the projects that do. So the answer is often not drop but not now: a good project that does not fit this quarter is released later, when the bottleneck has room.
Should we hire more people, or delay projects?
Ask it the other way round: what are you leaving on the table if you do not hire? Epicflow answers that in two steps. First the AI gets the most out of the people you already have, by optimising the whole portfolio. Only then does it look at extra capacity: if you bring in these people, with these skills, for this period, or borrow them from another group, this is what your portfolio earns on top. Each option comes as a What-If Analysis next to your plan, with the cost of the extra people and the money they bring in. As the sample-portfolio video on this page shows, a contractor brought in for the right month can pay back several times the cost, while the same budget spent away from the bottleneck adds cost and no output. So you see when a short-term contractor, a loan from another team or a permanent hire makes sense, before you spend anything.
Can we defend the AI's plan to our board?
Yes, and more easily than most plans boards approve today. The AI works towards the target you set (maximum profit, every mandatory deadline met, or the best cash flow) and on your own figures: your projects, your teams, your KPIs and the weights you give them in EPO. It is not a black box. The best plan arrives as a What-If Analysis next to your own plan, with the same projects and the same people, and for every project you see what drives its place: capacity at the bottleneck, business value per bottleneck hour, RRI and what a delay costs. The board sees the outcome in its own language, profit and cash flow, on the same numbers as the shop floor, and drag cost comes from Stephen Devaux's method, part of PMI's PMBOK Guide (8th Edition). Nothing changes in your live plan until you adopt it. Once you do, Epicflow shows progress against that plan, so the board can check the promise along the way.
Our plan is due within weeks. Is there still time?
Yes, if you start now. The test needs no implementation and no detailed plans: one row per department and one row per project, in a spreadsheet. That fits inside the planning cycle you already run. Timing matters more than it seems. While the plan is a draft, moving a project costs a line in a spreadsheet; once it is signed and teams have started, every change costs money and goodwill. So send the draft before the plan is locked, and use the result in the round where the decisions are still open.
What data do you need?
Very little, and nothing personal. One row per department: how many people (in FTE) and their average hourly rate. One row per project: start and due date, the hours still to go per department, the contract value or revenue behind it, and what a week early or late is worth (a bonus or a penalty). For internal projects without revenue, a business value is enough. Anonymise the names; keep the real figures. From these few numbers, Epicflow predicts when each project will finish given everything else your departments have on, what that date earns or costs, the RRI of every project and where your bottleneck is. When the draft changes, update the figures and run it again: a forecast is a basis for a decision, not a guarantee. See the worked example on our Manage projects as investments page.
Before you sign next year's plan
Send us the basics of your draft plan, anonymised, and we show you what it leaves on the table.