Your path to business agility
In part one of this series, How to Use Annual Budgeting to Increase Total Shareholder Return I explained how most companies make minor changes in their budget allocations from year-to-year. I also referenced a recent McKinsey Quarterly study that found that over time, companies earned on average 30% higher annual total returns to shareholders by...
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...
In a recently released research paper, Issue in Focus: Meeting Fixed Product Launch Windows analyst Jim Brown, Founder and President, Tech-Clarity, Inc., talks about how companies can use Product Portfolio Management (PPM) applications to hit timely product launch deadlines to improve new product development and overall performance. Conversations with product developers and the immediate interest...
For most people involved with project management, a Program/Project Management Office (PMO) is an ideal entity to deploy at any company. There’s much to like about a centralized group that does everything from creating and deploying standardized project management practices and tools, to managing dependencies among various projects while tracking their performance. At their best,...
Once again, our friends at Kalypso have issued a challenge for all of you product development companies out there… actually, two challenges this time. 1. Move past the myths that keep you from using social models and tools to support innovation and 2. If you have moved past these myths, nominate yourselves for a SPIKE...
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...
In previous blogs, APM: How Much Are Your Applications Really Costing You? and APM: Why Organizations Don’t Understand the TCO of Their Applications, I focused on how organizations can start to determine the technical and business value of their application portfolios. In this post, I would like to focus on aligning applications portfolios with the business...
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...
The link between a company’s strategy and the long-range planning process, which culminates in their annual budget, has always been, to put it nicely, a very loose one. For those of us close to the planning process, this has been a well-known problem for a long time. Yet we continue to be surprised when we...
Coffee Talk: It’s Your Link to the Latest Innovation and Product Portfolio Management News and Trends! We are excited to introduce this new video blog series, Coffee Talk, featuring the Product Portfolio Mavens. Likened to The View for Product Portfolio Management (PPM), the Mavens offer wise insights along with a fun perspective on critical topics for...
