An Even Lap Around the Room

Say a chief operating officer opens her quarterly review of eighteen major programs and the first slide tells her that most of them are on plan. She has forty minutes. On that evidence the sensible use of them is an even lap around the room, a few minutes per program, with the usual questions about dependencies and risk. Nobody would call that sloppy. It is how most portfolio reviews are run, and it is a reasonable response to the slide.

The Government Accountability Office published a version of that slide in July, in its annual assessment of NASA's major projects. Of NASA's 36 major projects, 18 are in development, and the report counts only four of those 18 as anticipating additional schedule delays or cost overruns.¹ Two reported annual schedule delays and three reported cost overruns, with one project, NISAR, doing both.¹ The heading over that section calls the delays and overruns limited across the portfolio, and adds that most Artemis projects were under review.¹

Where the money sits

The dollars are spread very differently from the projects. The Orion crew capsule accounts for over half of the major projects' annual cost overruns and almost 75 percent of their cumulative cost overruns.¹ Its annual overrun was $261 million, which the report ties to a seven month delay in its launch, one GAO had already reported a year earlier.¹ Two other projects reported overruns that year, the SLS Block 1B project at a projected $229.4 million and NISAR at $11 million.¹ By my arithmetic, Orion's overrun was more than twenty times the size of NISAR's.

Both statements about the portfolio are accurate. Four of eighteen is a small share of the projects, and almost three quarters of the cumulative overrun sitting in a single capsule is a large share of the money. A review built around the first number spreads attention across eighteen programs, and the exposure is concentrated in one.

Counts are popular in portfolio reviews for a good reason, which is that they roll up without argument. A project is on plan or it is not, and the tally needs nobody to agree on what a month of delay costs. Dollars over plan require a baseline that someone defended and a willingness to put one program's name at the top of a list its sponsor will read. Those are the chores the count lets a review skip, and the skipping is where the even lap comes from.

In an even lap around eighteen projects, the one holding almost three quarters of the cumulative overrun gets about an eighteenth of the meeting.¹

Reading the lap differently

Teams that run their work on a board meet a version of this early. They cap how much is in progress at one time, because attention is limited and belongs on the item that is stuck. A portfolio office can borrow the habit. Sort the programs by dollars over plan, put that column on the first page where nobody can skip it, and give the top one or two the first part of the review. Ask the top program what the next decision is that could move its date, and who owns that decision. Print each program's share of the total next to its name, so that the sponsor of the largest one is looking at a number that is hard to argue with.

The sort has a blind spot of its own, and the same report shows it. Several of the fourteen projects with nothing new to report have simply not been re-estimated yet. Four Artemis projects, among them the lunar Gateway and the crewed lander, report no overrun because they were under review, and GAO says its figures do not reflect the pending decisions on them.¹ It flags two of those four as likely to see their development end dates slip.¹ A column of dollars over plan only ranks programs whose plans are current, so it needs a second column beside it showing when each estimate was last redone. A large program with a stale estimate belongs near the top of the agenda even when its overrun column reads zero.

One detail in the report keeps this from being a story about a single capsule. Orion launched in April 2026, so GAO says it will leave the portfolio, taking approximately $3.5 billion of cumulative overrun with it, measured against its original baseline.¹ NISAR has launched as well, and NASA has discontinued SLS Block 1B, so every project carrying this year's overrun is on its way out.¹ The concentration will move somewhere else, quite possibly to a program whose estimate is still under review, which is why the sort has to be run again at every review. GAO's companion assessment of weapon systems turned up a different delivery problem, which I took up earlier in a piece on a fast lane for unfinished work, and I will leave that argument there.

An afternoon's check

Orion is one spacecraft, and a company's portfolio will be shaped differently. The check on yours takes an afternoon: list the programs by dollars over plan, note when each estimate was last redone, and divide the largest overrun by the total. If that share comes out anywhere near what Orion shows here, the agenda for your reviews has been in the wrong order. Which program on your list holds the largest share of what you are over plan, and how much of your last review did it get?