The project QS who rejects your portfolio strategy is not a Luddite. In fact, she may be the only person in the room reading the numbers as they are written.

Consider the numbers from her perspective. The central team asks her scheme to pay for common designs that don’t reflect her stakeholder needs, central support she did not ask for and extra reviews she could do without, in return for benefits that arrive later, spread thinly across other projects, credited to budgets outside her control. She is being judged on immediate affordability, not on the value of a shared investment whose payoff is unclear, deferred and buried in a business case she has never seen.

Some would call her view narrow, a failure to see the bigger picture, but viewed through this lens, it is completely rational.