Dan Smith
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Dan Smith

Dan Smith is the Product Manager for Advisor at Planview, Inc. Prior to that; he oversaw information security and application infrastructure at Enrich. Dan holds a graduate certificate in engineering management from the University of Cambridge, an MBA from Santa Clara University, and a BSE in mechanical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. He believes a company runs on its collective stomach and, in his spare time, plots reasons to bring cake into the office.

In R&D Portoflio Management, Failure is an Option – Enrich Consulting

Innovation is inherently risky. By definition, you’re doing something that you haven’t done before so there are no guarantees it will work. The mindset in many organizations is to “minimize” risk as if it were a disease, but it isn’t that simple. The best companies face risk head-on and manage it both systematically and transparently....

To Fund or Not to Fund: Helping Executives Get to “No” – Enrich Consulting

Another striking—and often underappreciated—aspect of [Steve] Jobs’ success was his ability to say no. At a company like Apple, thousands of ideas bubble up each year for new products and services that it could launch. The hardest thing for its leader is to decide which ones merit attention. Mr Jobs had an uncanny knack of...

Tied Up in Knots: Wasted Effort in R&D Portfolio Management – Enrich Consulting

“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...

All the NPVs are wrong. Can we talk about the portfolio now? – Enrich Consulting

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...

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…”...