3 ways to make your project and portfolio plans more adaptable in 2026

You spent months meticulously building your annual portfolio plan, aligning every resource and timeline to perfection. By February, a single strategic pivot or market shift has already rendered it obsolete. If that sounds familiar, you are not alone.

In today's fast-paced business environment, annual planning for project and portfolio professionals is no longer a "set it and forget it" event. Priorities now shift so rapidly that plans often become outdated before they are even shared with the wider team. According to a recent Smartsheet research study, 98% of PPM professionals report having to reprioritize work due to constant business changes.

The problem isn’t that your team can’t execute, but rather it's that the planning model itself is broken. Striking a balance between delivering measurable impact, maximizing resources without team burnout all while navigating shifting priorities is a complex endeavor. And annual plans were designed for a world that no longer exists.

So what replaces them? Adaptable portfolio plans. Essentially it is a planning system designed to continuously evolve, one that builds in regular checkpoints, transparent tradeoffs, and validated dependencies rather than locking in assumptions at the start of the year. Unlike a static annual plan, a living, adaptable project portfolio plan is built to bend without breaking.

To help project leaders navigate this shift with confidence, Smartsheet brought together four industry experts for our latest PPM Power Session:

• Andy Jordan, President of Roffensian Consulting Inc
• Pamela Clapp, Manager of IS Standards and Performance at Memorial Health
• AJ Soll, Co-founder of ImproveComp
• Sterling Shury, Senior Director of Strategic Transformation at Smartsheet

In this session, our panelists shared practical strategies for connecting team work to top-level goals and proved that in 2026, the best portfolio plan is an adaptable one.

Here are three key takeaways from their discussion.

1. Portfolio adaptability requires more structure, not less planning

What does portfolio structure actually look like in practice?

It sounds like a contradiction: to be more adaptable, you need more structure. We often associate adaptability with being fluid or even informal, but in the world of high-stakes project and portfolio management, the opposite is true. Adaptability is not about reacting on the fly; it is about building a dynamic architecture that can shift without breaking.

The common misconception is that an annual plan is a static commitment. In reality, the most successful portfolios are designed as living systems.

A.J. Soll, a consultant specializing in process improvement and portfolio management best practices, noted that having structure is vital in an era where teams are split across time zones and hybrid environments. “Discipline is the hardest when you’re distracted and attention is divided,” Soll explained. To solve this, he advocates for a “Start, Stop, Continue” framework. This is a rigorous, structured exercise where every stakeholder must explicitly decide the status of every initiative in the queue. By creating this shared artifact of decisions, leaders provide teams the transparency they need to stay productive amidst constant change. Establishing this archive yearly, bi-annually, or even quarterly ensures the portfolio remains a clear roadmap rather than a collection of moving targets.

Structure also requires pressure-testing your assumptions before the plan is finalized. Sterling Shury, Senior Director of Strategic Transformation at Smartsheet, warns that leaders often build plans assuming cross-functional support without validating actual capacity. The result is resourcing bottlenecks that stall execution mid-project. By building the validation of dependencies into the initial planning structure, leaders can ensure less resource shuffling and fewer stop-and-start delays.

Pamela Clapp, who leads the enterprise wide portfolio management and project governance team at Memorial Health, took this a step further with a formalized “Project Reset”. She describes this as a deliberate pause to both active work and the incoming queue against the organization’s top-level goals. “That pause has worked well for us," Clapp noted.“We made the hard call to cancel work, which freed up capacity and allowed us to realign those resources to the priorities that really mattered.”

These frameworks ensure that when the portfolio must evolve, it does so without sacrificing time, resources or alignment.

2. When everything is high priority, nothing is: The “Jalapeño Score” problem

How do you create a prioritization model that actually works?

When every project is labeled "high priority," the term loses its meaning. This creates a state of perpetual urgency that Soll described as the “Jalapeño Score problem” – and it’s one of the most quietly damaging patterns in portfolio management. “If everything’s on fire, then are we just using a jalapeño score?” Soll explained. “This is three jalapeños of heat versus 11 jalapeños of heat; it’s all on fire so it’s ineffective.”

The fix isn't a simpler prioritization system — it's a more rigorous one. Soll advocates for a multifaceted scoring model that goes beyond basic frameworks like “T-shirt sizing.” Instead of ranking priorities as small, medium, or large, you evaluate initiatives across weighted categories, such as board priorities, cost savings potential, and strategic impact. This produces a final score that ranks the portfolio hierarchy based on measurable value rather than subjective opinion.

Shury builds on this by recommending that teams rally around a single “golden metric” of value to further remove subjectivity. This is a shared definition of what success looks like for the organization. When the conversation shifts from individual priorities toward which initiatives truly move the needle for the organization, the portfolio becomes much more aligned on top-level goals instead of department-specific silos. The goal isn't to eliminate disagreement. It's to make the tradeoffs visible. So that when a project gets deprioritized, everyone understands why.

AI and metrics amplify human judgment — they don’t replace it

3. How should PPM leaders actually be using AI in portfolio planning?

The most common conversation about AI in portfolio management focuses on what AI can do. The more important conversation is about what it can't, and what that means for how you use it.

Shury noted that AI offers a massive opportunity for resource dependency planning and sequencing. By automating the manual work of predicting outcomes, such as what happens if a project is two months late, AI can synthesize complex data to identify bottlenecks before they occur. However, he warned that AI is only as good as the information it is trained on. To get accurate results, the data must be clean and the nuances of different roles, such as the difference between an Engineer and a Project Manager, must be clearly understood

In highly regulated environments like healthcare, Clapp emphasized that human judgment remains non-negotiable. “AI isn't going to own our decisions. It's going to support them,” Clapp explained. She also warned that "bad data is going to be amplified just as much as good data so we're in a place where human judgment still matters." She uses AI for scenario modeling to ask questions like, "If we pause project X, what happens to project Y?" but the final call still requires a leader’s perspective.

Soll uses AI daily to automate the busywork of status reporting, but emphasizes that human steering is still essential. He noted that AI isn’t yet mature enough to ask all the right questions on its own and it needs context that only experienced leaders can provide.

The practical takeaway: AI is most valuable as a leading indicator tool, surfacing signals early enough for leaders to act before problems escalate. But the governance structure, the data quality, and the final decision-making still require a human-first approach.

Ready to build your 2026 adaptable portfolio plan?

The most important shift in portfolio planning for 2026 means building in structure that enables movement, making tradeoffs visible instead of pretending they don't exist, and treating AI as a tool that amplifies your judgment (not one that replaces it). By designing a plan that is built to evolve, you ensure that your organization can navigate disruption with confidence and continue to deliver measurable value. The question isn't whether your portfolio will face disruption in 2026. It's whether your plan is built to handle it.

Want to dive deeper into these strategies? Watch the full PPM Power Session on demand to hear more from our expert panel.

And if you're ready to start building a more adaptable portfolio today, explore how Smartsheet supports project and portfolio management teams with the governance, visibility, and flexibility they need to plan for what's next.