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.
Finance and R&D can get along You’ve just finished briefing the executive committee on the methods for project valuation that you have worked so hard to establish in your R&D group. The team has finally acknowledged that risk needs to be managed in all its potential forms. You’ve reached consensus on the following set of...
Every firm we speak with talks about strategy, and yet for all the attention lavished upon the idea, few companies are able to craft a strategy that provides a clear path forward for the R&D organization. Why is it so hard? There are a wide range of statements that are interesting, useful, difficult to conceive,...
It is hard to open the paper these days without seeing a story presaging the demise of a another industry titan. If you believe the articles, Microsoft, GM, Xerox, Dell and many other bellwethers will face, at best, a slow, uninteresting decline due to their failure to innovate in ways that disrupt the markets in...
Sample playbook (click to enlarge) Over the years, we have seen again and again that how you present information is just as important as the information itself. Cram too much information on a screen or a page, combine nonessential and essential facts in one display, or fail to annotate a graph with important contextual information,...
I was speaking with a client at a large government-supported research lab the other day, and he reminded me of the success we enjoyed deploying the Enrich Portfolio System to support their annual portfolio process. When this group approached Enrich, they asked for help picking the winners within their portfolio, and justifying budget increases to...
Will the real efficient frontier please stand up? Each year, we attend many conferences focused on the themes of new product development, innovation, and portfolio management. One of my biggest pet peeves at these conferences arises when speakers discussing project prioritization present a scatter chart with individual projects cumulatively plotted in descending order of bang-for-the-buck...
They are dark times indeed when each day brings another tale of an industry stalwart shedding 1,000, 2,000, or even 10,000 jobs. It is especially daunting when companies are forced to make those cuts within research and development, the lifeblood of innovation and long-term survival. To our minds here at Enrich, there is an even...
Many of my recent discussions with portfolio staff have centered around the distinctions between project management and strategic R&D portfolio management applications. Often I hear a variant of the statement “We already have/are installing a capacity planning software. It does portfolio management…why would we need a dedicated strategic portfolio system?” In reality, there are critical...
The use of dashboards has been spreading throughout organizations. From tracking manufacturing performance to the latest sales numbers, dashboards aim to provide a quick, comprehensive snapshot of how well an organization, business unit, or project is performing. As R&D Portfolio Management processes mature within organizations, they evolve from once-a-year budgeting activities to evergreen processes that...
I recently read The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and found the book’s central tenets relevant to R&D portfolio management. I recommend you pick up a copy yourself, but until you do, I hope the following thoughts hit the mark for you as they did for me. What is a “Black Swan?” According to...
