Earlier in my career I was hired to work for the UN on the ‘2030 Agenda and SDG integration’, a post funded by my national government. It made sense — the 17 goals and its 169 targets are interconnected, and my organization was the designated ‘integrator’ across the 30+ UN development entities. In the years that followed I encountered many colleagues and partners who were passionate and collaborative; we came up with inter-sectoral ideas and not-so-familiar tools and approaches were tossed, turned, and if found meaningful, embedded into projects.

If we managed to be problem-oriented in the design and planning, as soon as we went into implementation, we became discipline-oriented, and the ‘problem’ and ‘solution’ belonged in practice to a single thematic team and with pre-determined activities. Looking back now, this unfortunately meant we were creating narrowly focused, short-term projects — to address complex challenges that affected diverse sectors of society.

Fast forward several years later within the same organization: we are exploring an alternative to the standard project management — a portfolio approach. Can this practice of portfolios bring us out of the often-linear, pre-planned, thematically siloed project management approach? Out of what is increasingly seen as a restricting development straitjacket?