Your path to business agility
Dan Smith is the Product Manager for Advisor at Planview, Inc. Prior to that; he oversaw information security and application infrastructure at Enrich. Dan holds a graduate certificate in engineering management from the University of Cambridge, an MBA from Santa Clara University, and a BSE in mechanical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. He believes a company runs on its collective stomach and, in his spare time, plots reasons to bring cake into the office.
Leaders must balance detailed short-term planning flexibility and strategic alignment to manage portfolios effectively. Most portfolio management platforms emphasize only one of these competencies at the expense of the other. For example, organizations striving for adaptability may stray too far from strategic goals, while organizations emphasizing strategy may be too rigid to react to near-term constraints....
In 2023, Planview was pleased to sponsor several WHY Summit Events: Basil, Switzerland, and Philadelphia. A year later, we returned to Philadelphia and then headed cross-country to San Francisco for the WHY Summit’s 21st and 22nd American Pharma and Biotech Project, Program, and Portfolio Management Conference. In this blog, we will illuminate a few common...
We’ve talked elsewhere about how EAP can provide sophisticated strategic resource planning and capacity planning. In those cases, the concerns were mostly around staffing—making sure key projects had the right people at the right time and anticipating and addressing staffing shortages. But other resources can benefit from this approach as well. Money, for instance—always needed...
The past several months have seen a flurry of dealmaking in pharma and biotech. Pfizer, having been rebuffed by AstraZeneca, bought a manufacturer of biosimilars, increasing speculation that the company is planning to split itself in two. Shire, similarly stung by its failed attempt to buy AbbVie, is buying NPS pharmaceuticals. A very public drama...
What is sales planning software? Sales planning software is used in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries to drive R&D, marketing, and manufacturing decisions both for in-market products and for medicines still in development. Functionally, it captures sales forecasts for each product in a company’s portfolio across geographies, patient segments, and product formulations. The forecasts are...
R&D-driven organizations face the constant challenge of deciding whether to continue funding existing projects and when to start new initiatives. The overwhelming majority of firms will use project prioritization to rank the opportunities as part of that exercise, with a small minority suspecting that optimization is better suited to the task of project selection. So...
It’s no secret that projects in the earlier stages of the development lifecycle are evaluated and managed very differently than projects in the later stages. One major pharmaceutical company believed these differences to be so great, however, that they split their development organization in two. Over time, the structural gulf became a cultural gulf, leading...
Innovation is inherently risky. By definition, you’re doing something that you haven’t done before so there are no guarantees it will work. The mindset in many organizations is to “minimize” risk as if it were a disease, but it isn’t that simple. The best companies face risk head-on and manage it both systematically and transparently....
Another striking—and often underappreciated—aspect of [Steve] Jobs’ success was his ability to say no. At a company like Apple, thousands of ideas bubble up each year for new products and services that it could launch. The hardest thing for its leader is to decide which ones merit attention. Mr Jobs had an uncanny knack of...
“We can’t talk about the portfolio until you explain why Varmenase revenue is 5% less than last year’s forecast!” In almost every large organization a huge percentage of the effort in the “portfolio” process is spent “tying out” the new project valuations with the old ones. Teams ardently create reports to explain why the net present...
