In the first half of this blog series, we talked about how product portfolio management can help companies select and develop the right digital innovations to move their businesses forward. The right portfolio management solution helps ensure products are developed from insights of customers and employees. Further, the right capabilities and priorities must be paired properly with resources. Before reading ahead, read part one of this series for the first five ways to improve digital product innovation.
Now, let’s pick up where we left off. The capabilities listed below can help you and your organization generate and collaborate on innovative ideas, pick the winners, and ensure the right resources are available to deliver digital innovation and IoT products on time and on budget.
- Resource capacity planning and impact – leverage the right people at the right time to deliver on the promise of IoT innovation. Resource capacity planning, when conducted on a continuous basis, helps ensure resources are always there when you need them. Portfolio management helps bring technology and product development people together in a single view to anticipate over-utilizations and adjust project timelines to fit available resources.
- Roadmapping – launch the right products at the right time. To get everyone on the same page for your IoT product initiative, you need to communicate how it fits into your strategic product and technology roadmap. Roadmapping can help you stay on track and identify dependencies between products and technology, platforms, projects, and services components. Eliminate the manual creation of visual roadmaps via slideware and share the roadmap internally or externally with a push of a button.
- Financial planning –monitor costs and review projects to achieve desired margins. Follow the money for your IoT project by managing labor and capital costs, as well as projected IoT product revenue forecasts across the product portfolio. Monitor financial estimates throughout the commercialization process and track variance to make informed and proactive decisions. Use purpose-built financial management software—not a desktop tool—to spend more time analyzing the numbers instead of gathering and massaging the numbers for reports.
- Collaboration and execution –break down departmental silos and bring together technology and development teams from around the globe to collaborate on your digital innovation and IoT portfolio. Use this function to streamline execution and keep team members and leaders informed along
the way without time-consuming status meetings. Increase project team efficiency by providing a digest of upcoming, ongoing, and overdue work for yourself. - Use analytics and reporting – roll up accurate data and insights to give everyone a look into the big picture of your IoT initiative. With everyone informed, you can make faster and more effective decisions, adapt to changing conditions, achieve growth targets, and plan for the future. Improved visibility for key stakeholders reduces the time and costs of traditional reports. Digitize your IoT product portfolio reports to measure how digital products and channels contribute to revenue. Reduce risk by making portfolio decisions in context of the strategy, brand, and capacity of the organization.
Today’s digital innovation/IoT combines physical and digital technologies, product development, IT, and many other resource areas. Organizations have to integrate systems, data, and processes as they connect strategy, planning, execution, and delivery for everyone in the organization.
To see how your IoT plans and processes stack up, check out the full eBook, “10 Steps to ‘Get Smart’ About Launching the Right IoT Products.”
![Five Ways to Drive Product Innovation in Manufacturing [Infographic]](https://blog.planview.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Drive-Product-Innovation-in-Manufacturing.jpg)
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