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Operationalize strategic plans - from formulation to execution across the organization.
The Economist recently published an interesting article, Strategic moves: Big consulting and accounting firms are making a risky move into strategy work, about what seems to be a new consolidation movement amongst the major strategy consulting firms and operations specialists in a effort to offer both strategy and execution services. Traditionally, within enterprises and throughout...
The September-October 2013 issue of Research Technology Management Journal includes a case study on portfolio management written by our own Dan Smith and yours truly: “From Budget-Based to Strategy-Based Portfolio Management: A Six-Year Case Study”. In it, we describe the journey of a life sciences company as it transitioned from a conservative, somewhat disordered investment...
It seems almost a universal truth that resource allocation exercises use prioritization at some point in the process. Nearly every company we’ve spoken to or heard from over the past decade-and-a-half, in Pharma or other industries, relies on it. Project prioritization has several things going for it: Mathematical simplicity: It’s very hard to quibble with...
There’s a nice blog post by statistician Jeff Leek on how more and more non-statisticians are finding themselves in roles that involve data analysis and visualization. Data are becoming more and more available, and less and less expensive to collect, and the tools for analyzing that data, from Excel to SAS to Spotfire, are becoming...
The starting point for most conversations about a candidate drug’s sales potential is a chart of drug sales by segment and time—month/quarter/year, depending on the planning horizon. Digging deeper, you are ‘treated’ to a huge table, or perhaps a bunch of bar charts, tallying the number of afflicted people, those afflicted who have insurance, those...
The term “Black Swan” was coined by University of Oxford, Saïd Business School professor Nassim Nicholas Taleb to describe high-impact events that are rare and unpredictable but in retrospect seem not so improbable. In the world of IT, black swan projects reap catastrophic effects and even result in a complete corporate meltdown. According to Taleb’s...
Building the investment business case for Enterprise Architecture (EA) requires speaking the language of business and delivering quick and ongoing returns. That was the advice from Bodhi Choudhuri, director of Enterprise Architecture at American Express, during Troux’ recent Building the Business Case for EA webinar. With EA initiatives facing stiff competition for funding and CIOs...
The portfolio review session is coming up, so you craft a list of questions about project value, cost, and risk that can be answered on a scale from 1 to 10. Your R&D project teams score their projects, add up the scores for each project, and voilà, you have a ranked set of projects, ready...
Experience shows that what happens is always the thing against which one has not made provision in advance. — John Maynard Keynes [1] An old cliché in forecasting is that when it comes to the single-valued forecast, the only thing you can say with certainty is that it’s wrong. More than just plain wrong numbers,...
The prevalent tendency to underweight, or ignore, distributional information is perhaps the major source of error of intuitive prediction…The analyst should therefore make every effort to frame the forecasting problem so as to facilitate utilizing all the distributional information that is available to the expert. —Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky [1] Most people involved in...
