Resource Management

The Annual Budgeting Process: Insanity is Expecting Different Results from Spreadsheets

Albert Einstein has been credited in saying, “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” If you are charged with some element of the annual budgeting process for your organization, such as capital planning, strategic planning, budgeting, and annual allocations, among others; chances are you’ve been inundated with spreadsheets, tab delimited...

Top Innovation and Product Development Resources of 2012

Happy New Year! As we kick off 2013, I thought it would be helpful to share some of the most popular innovation and product development resources of 2012. These whitepapers and webcasts feature analysts, thought leaders, and practitioners sharing their wisdom and experience to help us make better, more informed decisions and optimize our limited resources....

Optimizing Resources in Product Development

10 Historically Proven Military Strategies that You Can Apply in Your Organization for Optimizing Resources in Product Development “From Sun Tzu’s 13 principles to Napoleon’s 115 maxims, to the countless other [military] strategies, there are hidden gems of resource management advice that are as relevant today as they were back then.” After reading this statement in...

Product Portfolio Management: A Look Back and a Look Ahead

How the Product Portfolio Management Benchmark Study Findings Should Inform 2013 Planning It’s that wonderful time of year again — planning, planning, and more planning. Where are you and your organization in the portfolio planning process at this point? Patting ourselves on the back because we are done! In the thick of it and taking...

4 Dashboards Vital to Profitability for Tech Services Companies

In the first section of this two part series, 13 Key SRP Metrics Vital to Profitability for Tech Services Companies, I outline specific metrics necessary to measure performance across multiple business units for successful resource planning in Technology Services organizations. This blog will discuss the top dashboards required to provide visibility of those key metrics,...

Optimizing Your Resources: Learn from the Military

Now more than ever, organizations are asked to do more with less. Pressures mount, competition is building, and there seems to never be enough resources to tackle what needs to be done. Then, when resources are finally allocated to strategic work, the work ends up getting delayed because the people are pulled off on emergencies,...

How Clinical Research Organizations Are Transforming in Today’s Environment—Part 2

The Solution for CROs The previous blog in this series discussed the increasing growth rates and related issues seen the Clinical Research Organization (CRO) space due to strategic partnerships, globalism, and market consolidation from mergers and acquisitions. This kind of growth inevitably presents challenges for CROs trying to generate data from fragmented, non-integrated systems. There...

How Clinical Research Organizations Are Transforming in Today’s Environment—Part 1

There is a significant transformation underway in the clinical research organization (CRO) space. The CRO market revenue amounts to approximately $30 billion, which is primarily generated from its core business of conducting clinical trials required for drug market admission by regulatory authorities like the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines...

Services Resource Planning—Changing the Game for Service-Driven Organizations

Game-Changing Services Resource Planning In my previous blog, Blindsided: Why Service-Driven Organizations are Unprepared for Swings in Demand, I discussed some of the pain project-based service organizations are currently facing. To summarize, virtually every organization experiences the following challenges: Unreliable forecasting means incoming demand is always a surprise Poor visibility of resource utilization; to find the...