Strategic Planning

Operationalize strategic plans - from formulation to execution across the organization.

Is Your Innovation Strategy Actionable? – Enrich Consulting

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,...

Are large companies doomed to failure? – Enrich Consulting

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...

One-pagers and playbooks – Enrich Consulting

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,...

Upcoming Portfolio Management Conference: CHI November 2012 – Enrich Consulting

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…”...

Portfolio Management, By the Numbers – Enrich Consulting

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...

Takeaways from IRI: Driving Innovation – Enrich Consulting

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...

Why Organizations Don’t Understand the TCO of Their Applications

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...

Efficient Frontiers and Productivity Rankings in Project Prioritization – Enrich Consulting

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...

Avoid the Haircut: Sustaining R&D in Difficult Times – Enrich Consulting

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...

How Much Are Your Applications Really Costing You?

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...