Your path to business agility
Is it appropriate for product-based organizations to make improvised decisions when they don’t have visibility or access to proper data or metrics? Do product leaders have the resources for priority projects to drive innovation and growth? Is it possible that underperforming projects continue to consume precious resources? According to the industry’s third Product Portfolio Management...
“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...
In my presentation at the Gartner 2012 PPM Summit, I discussed “Delivering What Matters: Focusing the PMO on the Big Picture.” I presented a number of themes, all of which, to my delight, aligned quite nicely with the collective keynotes and presentations at the conference. There’s no doubt that the role of the PMO is changing,...
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 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,...
Cloud-based solutions are clearly here to stay, which is a really good thing for enterprises and consumers. In the enterprise, software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings have been the dominant cloud-based solution in recent history. More and more organizations are reaping the economic benefits of adopting SaaS offerings across a broad range of software categories. For example, cloud-hosted...
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...
Reflecting on time with product developers and innovation leaders from around the globe in PIPELINE 2012, I am truly impressed by several things: The amazing speakers The feedback we’re receiving indicates that I am not alone appreciation of the quality of the innovators, scholars, authors, and product development practitioners who took the time to participate 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,...
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…”...
