Ihr Weg zu geschäftlicher Agilität
Dan Smith ist der Produktmanager für Advisor bei Planview, Inc. Zuvor war er bei Enrich für die Informationssicherheit und die Anwendungsinfrastruktur zuständig. Dan hat einen Abschluss in Engineering Management von der University of Cambridge, einen MBA von der Santa Clara University und einen BSE in Mechanical Engineering von der University of Pennsylvania. Er ist der Meinung, dass ein gutes Unternehmen auf gemeinsamen Mahlzeiten basiert, und findet stets Gründe dafür, Kuchen mit ins Büro zu bringen.
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...
A review of Itanium server sales forecasts made over seven years reveals the same bias year after year after year. When the economist Kenneth Arrow was working as an air force weather forecaster during the Second World War, he and his colleagues found that their long-range weather predictions were no better than random. They informed...
Every November the Cambridge Healthtech Institute hosts a portfolio management conference for the life sciences industry that spans both operational and strategic portfolio management. We find it to be the best portfolio management conference in the U.S., and to steal a page from movie critics, “If you only go to one portfolio conference this year…”...
