Your path to business agility
Operationalize strategic plans - from formulation to execution across the organization.
“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...
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,...
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...
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…”...
I was speaking with a client at a large government-supported research lab the other day, and he reminded me of the success we enjoyed deploying the Enrich Portfolio System to support their annual portfolio process. When this group approached Enrich, they asked for help picking the winners within their portfolio, and justifying budget increases to...
We sponsored the 2012 Industrial Research Institute (IRI) Annual Meeting this month, and the primary topic was how to drive innovation in large organizations. These organizations have become large because they’re very good at some “thing”, which for the sake of simplicity we’ll call a core competency. This core competency is typically focused on a particular type...
Application Portfolio Management (APM) is a process used to attempt to capture application performance and spending over time. Recently, Gartner published a report stating that “Fewer than 10% of Global 2000 organizations understand the full costs of their applications.” ¹ Why are so many organizations failing to do this right? I believe these organizations are...
Will the real efficient frontier please stand up? Each year, we attend many conferences focused on the themes of new product development, innovation, and portfolio management. One of my biggest pet peeves at these conferences arises when speakers discussing project prioritization present a scatter chart with individual projects cumulatively plotted in descending order of bang-for-the-buck...
