Your path to business agility
Operationalize strategic plans - from formulation to execution across the organization.
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...
Developers that work with an issue tracking system are torn between two extremes. They often would like to know everything that is happening on their project yet their main focus is on tasks assigned to them. In practice, neither an overly nosey or a hermit-like approach works well, as developers are either overwhelmed by the...
