Your path to business agility
Operationalize strategic plans - from formulation to execution across the organization.
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...
They are dark times indeed when each day brings another tale of an industry stalwart shedding 1,000, 2,000, or even 10,000 jobs. It is especially daunting when companies are forced to make those cuts within research and development, the lifeblood of innovation and long-term survival. To our minds here at Enrich, there is an even...
Many organizations spend a significant amount of time managing product and project portfolios. After all, it’s what drives innovation and strategic changes to the business. Usually 30 to 40 percent of the IT budget is dedicated to it. But how are we managing the remaining 60 percent? One area that is consuming a large portion...
Many of my recent discussions with portfolio staff have centered around the distinctions between project management and strategic R&D portfolio management applications. Often I hear a variant of the statement “We already have/are installing a capacity planning software. It does portfolio management…why would we need a dedicated strategic portfolio system?” In reality, there are critical...
The use of dashboards has been spreading throughout organizations. From tracking manufacturing performance to the latest sales numbers, dashboards aim to provide a quick, comprehensive snapshot of how well an organization, business unit, or project is performing. As R&D Portfolio Management processes mature within organizations, they evolve from once-a-year budgeting activities to evergreen processes that...
Rocks in the river When selecting projects for the portfolio, practitioners of Strategic Capacity Planning often exclusively consider financial constraints. Though the terminology varies across industries–outside costs, out-of-pocket expenditures, external expenditure–the concept is the same: money spent on something other than staff. If internal resources are considered at all, it is usually at a very...
I recently read The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and found the book’s central tenets relevant to R&D portfolio management. I recommend you pick up a copy yourself, but until you do, I hope the following thoughts hit the mark for you as they did for me. What is a “Black Swan?” According to...
