Key takeaway
Every extra tool in a project's workflow is a place the truth can quietly diverge from what's in the other four.
Walk through how a typical project actually gets run and it rarely lives in one place. Tasks sit in one tool. Risks and dependencies live in a document nobody else opens. Status goes out as a slide deck built fresh each week. Approvals happen over email. The real day-to-day conversation happens in Slack or Teams, and none of it feeds back into any of the other four. Each tool is fine on its own. The problem is what happens between them.
This is tool sprawl, and it is rarely a PMO's deliberate choice, it accumulates: a task tool adopted for one team, a risk template inherited from a previous PM, a reporting deck format the client expects, a chat tool everyone was already using anyway. Nobody sat down and designed a five-system workflow, it just became one, one reasonable addition at a time.
The real cost is reconciliation, not licensing
The obvious cost of tool sprawl is the subscription fees stacking up, but that is rarely the expensive part. The expensive part is reconciliation: someone has to periodically check that what the task tool says matches what the status deck says matches what actually happened in the last client email, because none of those systems know the others exist. That someone is almost always the PM, and that work is invisible on any invoice.
Reconciliation done well is thorough and still slow. Reconciliation done under deadline pressure gets skipped, and that is when a client hears one number in the steering committee and a completely different one from the delivery team a week later, from the same project.
Consolidation is not about picking one tool for everything
The fix is not necessarily forcing every team onto a single monolithic system, that trade-off has its own costs. It is making sure the things that actually need to agree with each other, scope, milestones, dependencies, risks and tasks, live in one connected record rather than five disconnected ones. A team can still use Slack to talk and email to correspond with a client. What should not be true is that the project's actual status depends on someone manually keeping a spreadsheet, a deck, and a task board all saying the same thing.