Your 2027 Budget Is Approved. Your January Is Not.

Budget approval feels like the finish line. It is the start of a three-month window most companies waste.

The budget meeting ends the way it usually does. The launch calendar is approved, the headcount plan is close to what you asked for, and the board deck tells a clean story. Everyone leaves the room believing the hard part is done.

Then Monday comes. The engineers named in the 2027 plan are still deep in 2026 work. A verification build that slipped over the summer is now due before year end. Sustaining work nobody budgeted for is still in the queue. And the programs that were just approved need those same senior people in the first six weeks of the year, when the architecture decisions get made.

I have sat in that meeting on the manufacturer side, and I have watched it play out with clients ever since. What rarely gets said in the room is the obvious part: the people in the plan are not free yet. Most of the leaders at that table already know it. A board deck is not built to show it.

This is not a management failure

Nobody planned badly. The plan assumes that finishing 2026 and starting 2027 happen one after the other. In practice they happen at the same time, with the same people. When one team carries two sets of priorities, both get worse results than either would get on its own.

Sharing people across programs does have real benefits. Mark Mortensen and Heidi Gardner have studied collaboration in hundreds of teams, and writing in Harvard Business Review, they credit the practice with better use of talent and better knowledge sharing. They also name the cost: competing priorities make it hard for teams that share members to stay on track, cohesion suffers, and people spread across several teams risk burning out.¹ Their opening example could have come from any medtech portfolio review. A senior leader’s launch slips badly, and nothing is wrong with her program. Her three key engineers have spent days fighting a security breach on another team’s product, and she is the one who has to tell the CEO the date is gone.

Both programs pay for it

The 2026 program drags because its best people drift toward the new work. That is where leadership attention is, and where the interesting problems are. The last stretch of a program (final verification, documentation, transfer to manufacturing) does not get easier when the engineer who knows it best is sitting in kickoff meetings.

The 2027 program stalls for the opposite reason. Its early phase is where senior people matter most: system architecture, requirements, and the risk decisions that are expensive to undo later. If those people are only half available, the new program either waits for them or makes early calls without them and pays for it in rework.

Either way, by the time the new programs are really moving it is March, and you are explaining a late first quarter on work that was approved in September.

The wrong conclusion

Most companies look at this and decide they need more people. Sometimes that is true. But a requisition approved in October rarely becomes a productive senior engineer by January, and every new hire needs time from the same people you are already short on. In most of the cases I have seen, what was missing was not headcount. It was a decision.

What deferring costs

The work that gets pushed first is usually work on products already in the field: the open CAPA, the complaint trend nobody has had time to analyze, the design fix waiting on an engineer who moved to the new program. Those problems do not wait quietly. Reviewing FDA’s 2025 inspection activity, device attorneys at Hogan Lovells Cadwalader reported that CAPA is still the most frequently cited issue, that FDA now uses AI tools to analyze complaint data when deciding where to inspect, and that companies with unresolved CAPAs are being flagged earlier and more often.² When a complaint trend becomes a field issue or an inspection finding, new product development does not slow down. It stops, because the people needed to fix the problem are the same senior people you just assigned to 2027. If it escalates to a warning letter, FDA’s own procedures call for the letter to say that related Class III premarket approval applications will not be approved until the violations are corrected, and that requests for export certificates may not be granted.³ That is rarely a one-quarter problem.

The decision most teams avoid

The decision itself is simple to describe. Which 2026 programs are actually finishing, by when, and with whom? What happens to the rest: pause, cut scope, hand off, or stop? Any of those can be the right answer. The one that is almost never right is the default, where nobody decides and a program winds down by attrition as its people drift to the new work. Letting attrition decide is still a decision. Nobody made it on purpose, and it usually costs more than any option someone could have chosen.

The three months after budget approval are when this decision is cheapest to make. Every week it waits, there are fewer good options left.

Three questions before January

1. What in your 2026 portfolio will actually finish in Q4, and who committed to that date?
2. Which 2027 programs need senior architecture time in the first six weeks?
3. Are the same names on both lists?

If any of those answers are harder to pin down than they should be, we are glad to talk them through with you at SuntraMedTech.com/contact.

Sources

1. Mark Mortensen and Heidi K. Gardner, “The Overcommitted Organization,” Harvard Business Review, September-October 2017, https://hbr.org/2017/09/the-overcommitted-organization.
2. Jodi Scott and Mike Heyl, “FDA Medical Device Inspections in 2025: What We’re Seeing, What We Expected, and Why You Need the Right Expertise Now,” Hogan Lovells Cadwalader, September 18, 2025, https://www.hlc.com/en/publications/fda-medical-device-inspections-in-2025.
3. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Regulatory Procedures Manual, chap. 4, “Advisory Actions,” sec. 4-1-10, July 2024, https://www.fda.gov/media/71878/download.