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 attention. The conversations around the room reflected the excitement of a presentation that connected with the crowd. I was demonstrating some of our latest tools for portfolio management, and explaining our vision, honed over 15 years, of how effective decisions begin with effective conversations, and effective conversations are enabled by well-thought-out tools. If you haven’t seen what we’ve been up to lately at Enrich, take a couple of minutes to look at this overview:
What is so exciting about portfolio management? Attendees were excited about the possibility of participating in effective, decisive portfolio conversations. In discussions after my presentation, I asked people what resonated with them. Here’s what I heard:
“With all the bubbles flying around, it was like magic.” Flying bubbles per se aren’t useful, but a dashboard where you’re able to slice your portfolio across every available dimension, and make sense of spending and value trends, is essential to rapid decision making. The flying bubbles do help you track changes as you switch views; that they are fun to watch is icing on the cake.
“If we had these tools during my time as VP of R&D at _____, we would have had much smoother sailing.” Portfolio analysts are exhausted by building and rebuilding fat PowerPoint decks that attempt to answer every potential question about the portfolio. Executives are frustrated because even with all the materials generated, their questions often don’t get answered. The solution is to put all available information at everyone’s fingertips, in an interface that is easy to use.
“Pulling variances, and forecast changes, into the analysis is something we’ve been trying to do for years.” Knowing whether a specific initiative’s value has increased or decreased lately, and what external or internal events have driven these changes, gives executives essential information on program context, leading to more confident decision making. Enrich tools make it dead simple to drill down and look at each project’s development history.
“Your toolbox will let me build all of the reports and dashboards our IT department has been building for us over the past several months. And when I need a new one, I’ll build it myself, no IT help required.” After over a decade of working with teams to build portfolio review decks, we have an innate sense of what reports are needed for each specific R&D decision making use case. We’ve made all these reports instantly available with our PPM software: Enrich Analytics Platform.
