Your path to business agility
Operationalize strategic plans - from formulation to execution across the organization.
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...
Here is an uncomfortable reality in all but the smallest firms during their R&D portfolio management processes: Between the staff running each R&D initiative and the executives making project and portfolio decisions, there’s usually a division. Maybe it’s the gap between headquarters and lab, upstairs/downstairs, east coast/west coast, London/Singapore, or even a generation gap. At...
Dan Smith and I have written a white paper on strategic R&D portfolio management that summarizes many of the lessons and insights we’ve gleaned during twelve years of client engagements. The white paper is organized into eight ‘rules’: Avoid incomplete strategies Build an actionable strategy Don’t buy in to bubble plots Move beyond prioritization Present...
It’s no secret that projects in the earlier stages of the development lifecycle are evaluated and managed very differently than projects in the later stages. One major pharmaceutical company believed these differences to be so great, however, that they split their development organization in two. Over time, the structural gulf became a cultural gulf, leading...
Humans have always been and will always be storytellers. From the fireside tales of bygone millennia to today’s TV dramas and movies, the power of the narrative holds us in rapt attention as it both entertains and makes sense of the world around us. How does this relate to pharmaceutical portfolio management? Essentially, portfolio management...
