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.
Experience shows that what happens is always the thing against which one has not made provision in advance. — John Maynard Keynes [1] An old cliché in forecasting is that when it comes to the single-valued forecast, the only thing you can say with certainty is that it’s wrong. More than just plain wrong numbers,...
The prevalent tendency to underweight, or ignore, distributional information is perhaps the major source of error of intuitive prediction…The analyst should therefore make every effort to frame the forecasting problem so as to facilitate utilizing all the distributional information that is available to the expert. —Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky [1] Most people involved in...
Here is an uncomfortable reality in all but the smallest firms during their R&D portfolio management processes: Between the staff running each R&D initiative and the executives making project and portfolio decisions, there’s usually a division. Maybe it’s the gap between headquarters and lab, upstairs/downstairs, east coast/west coast, London/Singapore, or even a generation gap. At...
Dan Smith and I have written a white paper on strategic R&D portfolio management that summarizes many of the lessons and insights we’ve gleaned during twelve years of client engagements. The white paper is organized into eight ‘rules’: Avoid incomplete strategies Build an actionable strategy Don’t buy in to bubble plots Move beyond prioritization Present...
Humans have always been and will always be storytellers. From the fireside tales of bygone millennia to today’s TV dramas and movies, the power of the narrative holds us in rapt attention as it both entertains and makes sense of the world around us. How does this relate to pharmaceutical portfolio management? Essentially, portfolio management...
A product manager and an analyst are discussing the revenue forecast for a product in development. Poring over the financials, the manager asks: “Have you considered how SUPR-3 will impact sales of our other SUPR products?” The analyst replies confidently: “Yes! Right here you can see we are estimating SUPR-3 to take a...
It’s that time of year again: We find more requests for proposals (RFPs) in our inbox during the late summer and early fall than any other time of year. RFPs vary dramatically in length, complexity, and level of ambition. In a spirit of cooperation, allow me to make some suggestions about those RFPs, and about...
When we engage with a client, our primary objective is to ensure that they are investing in the right projects: Those in closest alignment with their strategic goals. Without proper attention paid to project execution, however, you’ll never unlock the potential of your chosen projects. Last year we blogged about the distinctions between operational and...
As we have said before, every forecast you’ll ever build is wrong. The truth may be out there, but due to a lack of perfect information about the future, you won’t be able to reveal it before your project review meeting. There is a paradox here: The more you insist on the truth, the more...
What is an R&D-driven company with $10-50 billion of cash in the bank to do? In the last twelve months, Merck, Pfizer, HP, AstraZeneca, and Bristol-Myers Squibb have announced stock buybacks totaling over $25 billion, and layoffs of over 30,000 employees. So apparently, for many firms, the best use of their cash hoard is a...
