Dr. Richard Sonnenblick
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Dr. Richard Sonnenblick

Chief Data Scientist

Dr. Sonnenblick, Planview’s Chief Data Scientist, holds years of experience working with some of the largest pharmaceutical and life sciences companies in the world. Through this in-depth study and application, he has successfully formulated insightful prioritization and portfolio review processes, scoring systems, and financial valuation and forecasting methods for enhancing both product forecasting and portfolio analysis. Dr. Sonnenblick holds a Ph.D. and MS from Carnegie Mellon University in Engineering and Public Policy and a BA in Physics from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Getting Started: Beginning Portfolio Management (2 of 5) – Enrich Consulting

This is the second post in our series on doing more portfolio management with less project data. You’ll find the whole series here. Data needed at each level of portfolio management. The only required data are the three items in the orange Beginner box. How much further you go depends on your people, your portfolio,...

Upcoming Innovation and PPM Conferences – Enrich Consulting

It’s time to network and share best-practices!   The next six months is high season for conferences, and Enrich is excited to sponsor eight different events across North America and Europe between now and March 2017. While we recommend all of these conferences as excellent opportunities to network, learn from your peers, and share your...

Project Metrics: What’s Behind the Numbers? – Enrich Consulting

We’re often asked, “What’s the best metric for portfolio management?” Executives and managers who oversee new product portfolios want one metric that will tell them, and their superiors, how their portfolios and the initiatives within them are doing. They want one indicator they can rely upon, whether in formal portfolio reviews or informal discussions. But there is...

Portfolio Prioritization Best Practices – Enrich Consulting

Our latest video covers prioritization by value metrics, when to use productivity metrics, how to build a frontier chart, and when to temper simple prioritization with more sophisticated methods. You can see it here, right now. As always, we’d love to hear your comments and suggestions on topics for future videos.

From Data Scapegoat to Data Shepherd – Enrich Consulting

In most R&D organizations, the portfolio management team walks a narrow line between the project teams and the executives. The portfolio staff polls the project teams for information about each new and ongoing initiative, builds portfolio views, and shares the updated state of the portfolio with executives. In an ideal world, the portfolio team members...

7 Views of Project-Portfolio Variance

Knowing the current cost and estimated value of every initiative in your portfolio is nice, but when executives meet for a review, what they really want to know is: What’s changed since the last review, was it good or bad, and why? The above is true whether a month, a quarter, or a year has...

When Gantt Charts Fail: Use Flag Charts to Show Upcoming Events – Enrich Consulting

You’re probably familiar with Gantt charts, which show project tasks, their duration, and their completion dates. For a specific project, project managers and executives use Gantt charts to quickly review upcoming activities. When reviewing a portfolio of projects, project managers sometimes continue to use Gantt charts, adding upcoming tasks for all projects to a single...

Avoiding King Kong Projects – Enrich Consulting

“Hey Percy, what happened to the two medical writers who were supposed to start work with us this week?” “Oh, you didn’t hear, Luke? They were pulled to work on project PDE_311 at the last minute.” “Ugh, just like the bio-statistician that we were supposed to have last month!” said an exasperated Luke. “That’s the...

Scenario Planning 101 – Enrich Consulting

Uh-oh The goal of portfolio management is to effect changes that minimize risk and maximize value. But change is hard, and corporate change is harder still. People need motivation. The best way to build that motivation is to lay the consequences of the present course bare and make the status quo completely unpalatable. Like Thelma...