Your path to business agility
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.
It doesn’t matter how much you think you’ve prepared, how many run-throughs you’ve done, how many assurances you have from your project teams that all the data will be there, and be correct. Something will go wrong: a critical piece of data will be missing, the slides will be wrong, an unanswerable question will derail...
It’s every portfolio manager’s nightmare. The annual portfolio review is about to kick off. Hundreds of hours of preparation have gone into the main presentation’s PowerPoint deck, and hundreds more into each of the backup decks, readied in case management asks about the details of any of the projects under discussion. Information encompassing over a...
While I spoke at the EBCG Portfolio Management in Life Sciences Conference, people started talking. I don’t mean in whispers, or on their mobiles behind their hands. It started a quietly, as a susurration, and became louder, until I momentarily stopped speaking to ask myself “is anyone paying attention?” The thing is, they were paying...
We are surrounded by evidence of resilience: Our immune systems fight off thousands of potential invaders every day and constantly hone their defenses in response to the threats they experience. Ecosystems evolve to use the forces that might otherwise threaten them, such as the sequoia forests of the Sierra Nevada, which don’t just survive forest...
The purpose of portfolio management is to select a set of projects that best fits the company strategy. However, ask three senior executives in your organization for the company’s strategy, and you may well hear three different answers—if you get any answers at all. Strategy, it turns out, is an elusive beast, especially the well-crafted,...
The September-October 2013 issue of Research Technology Management Journal includes a case study on portfolio management written by our own Dan Smith and yours truly: “From Budget-Based to Strategy-Based Portfolio Management: A Six-Year Case Study”. In it, we describe the journey of a life sciences company as it transitioned from a conservative, somewhat disordered investment...
It seems almost a universal truth that resource allocation exercises use prioritization at some point in the process. Nearly every company we’ve spoken to or heard from over the past decade-and-a-half, in Pharma or other industries, relies on it. Project prioritization has several things going for it: Mathematical simplicity: It’s very hard to quibble with...
There’s a nice blog post by statistician Jeff Leek on how more and more non-statisticians are finding themselves in roles that involve data analysis and visualization. Data are becoming more and more available, and less and less expensive to collect, and the tools for analyzing that data, from Excel to SAS to Spotfire, are becoming...
The starting point for most conversations about a candidate drug’s sales potential is a chart of drug sales by segment and time—month/quarter/year, depending on the planning horizon. Digging deeper, you are ‘treated’ to a huge table, or perhaps a bunch of bar charts, tallying the number of afflicted people, those afflicted who have insurance, those...
The portfolio review session is coming up, so you craft a list of questions about project value, cost, and risk that can be answered on a scale from 1 to 10. Your R&D project teams score their projects, add up the scores for each project, and voilà, you have a ranked set of projects, ready...
