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11 09, 2020

Introducing the Enrich Pipeline Explorer

By |2021-09-24T14:15:08-08:00September 11th, 2020|Blog|0 Comments

Successful innovation groups are always looking for easy ways to broadcast R&D portfolio initiative status to the broader organization. Today we’re officially rolling out the Enrich Pipeline Explorer as a frictionless way for teams already using the Enrich Analytics Platform to share critical project information with their colleagues. With Pipeline Explorer, teams can offload the barrage of questions about project and portfolio timing, status, and risks, providing colleagues with access to an easy-to-navigate application that instantly answers all their questions.

Whether staff are looking for information on a specific initiative, want to browse projects by division or technology platform, or want to create a report via PowerPoint or Adobe Acrobat, the Pipeline Explorer is a one-stop solution.

Take a deeper look with the video below. Contact us to learn more.

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1 07, 2020

Portfolio Management in a Pandemic: A Case Study

By |2020-07-01T09:56:02-08:00July 1st, 2020|Blog|0 Comments

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought severe disruption to many industries, including drug development and medical device companies. All businesses face uncertainty about the return to normalcy—and what normal will even look like going forward. For some industries, the new normal might look very different. For others, like pharma and medical devices, the new normal may not require as much change. In fact, some signs of a return to normal are already appearing: Clinical trials are starting to resume. Demand for non-COVID 19 drugs and medical devices is rising again as routine medical care returns. The key uncertainty for these companies is in the timing of return to normal and the rate at which it will happen.

In times like these, when uncertainty is the only sure thing, portfolio management is more important than ever. One pharma company’s story shows how portfolio management can help you plan through the unknowns of the pandemic and continue to manage through it, even as those unknowns evolve. It illustrates how portfolio management can be used to accommodate disruptions, whether internal or external, that impact the company’s ability to deliver. (more…)

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18 06, 2020

Single Source of Truth, Make Way for a Single Source of Understanding

By |2020-06-18T04:47:28-08:00June 18th, 2020|Blog|0 Comments

Make way for ducklings and for a single source of understanding (apologies to Robert McCloskey)

In my last post I covered the essential attributes of an effective single source of truth—a consolidated, reliable source of project information. But simply collecting project details into a centralized vault is not enough for effective R&D decision making. Your single source of truth needs to become a single source of understanding. A single source of understanding moves beyond the (admittedly already ambitious) single source of truth to

  • Drive consensus on what you do and do not know about the cost, risk, and value of your initiatives
  • Resolve (not just surface) disagreements
  • Go beyond “what is” and highlight “what’s changed” since the last discussion
  • Support conversations around available options and their impacts

Is there really a single truth?

It is a cruel irony that you can create a single source of truth, but there is no single truth. Business is fraught with uncertainty, and no one truly knows whether an innovative product will meet engineering specs, cost constraints, customer requirements, or sales expectations. (more…)

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25 05, 2020

No Time Like the Present: Finally Ready for a Single Source of Truth?

By |2020-06-01T12:19:54-08:00May 25th, 2020|Blog|0 Comments

Almost daily, we hear from companies that they want to create “a single source of truth” for R&D portfolio management at their company. Software providers list “single source of truth” as a key feature of their products. And, in the midst of our months-long shelter-in-place, leveraging the collective wisdom of the company to make critical R&D decisions is harder than ever, adding urgency to the need for a single-source of truth.

Like many buzzwords though, “single source of truth” is in need of some clarity: What is it, how do I get one, and is it enough?

If you’re still downloading data to Excel each week so you can update your PowerPoint deck, you’re not reaping the benefits of a single source of truth

What Is a Single Source of Truth?

A “single source of truth” is that one place everyone can turn for decision-relevant information on internal initiatives. It is a compelling alternative to spreadsheets, slide decks, and the other assorted, incomplete, and out-of-date documents scattered hither and yon throughout a company. A single source of truth is different from those other records in several ways: (more…)

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16 07, 2019

Bullseye Charts for Complex Landscapes

By |2019-07-16T11:35:34-08:00July 16th, 2019|Blog|0 Comments

Innovation-driven firms are always on the lookout for effective new ways to communicate the nuances of their product pipeline and competitive position to management, analysts, and the product teams within R&D. While the pipeline charts offered within Enrich Analytics have become a go-to best-practice for our clients, we noticed a few companies building radial charts to describe their portfolios when the number of products, competitors, or market segments became excessive. These charts were painstakingly built within Microsoft PowerPoint or Adobe Illustrator, and took many hours to create, refine, and curate as the landscape evolved.

Enrich now offers bullseye charts as a standard part of both Viewport and the Enrich Analytics Platform. Now users of Enrich Analytics can build these information-dense visualizations in seconds, with just a few clicks of a mouse.

These charts have two advantages over a standard rectangular pipeline or landscape chart:

  1. They can accommodate many more market/product segments as arcs around the bullseye than is possible on the y-axis of a pipeline chart
  2. With more room in the outer rings of the bullseye, they are well-suited to development life-cycles with extensive attrition that generally have fewer items plotted in the inner rings

To learn more about bullseye charts, watch our short (less than four minutes) video below. We look forward to your feedback on these visualizations and the role they play in your portfolio and competitive analyses.

 

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22 05, 2019

Making Portfolio Management a Competitive Advantage

By |2019-05-22T16:55:16-08:00May 22nd, 2019|Blog|1 Comment

Many companies invest heavily in their project management processes and tools, improving their ability to keep initiatives on-time and on-budget. However, project management pays dividends only if the projects you’ve chosen to undertake have intrinsic value, are aligned with your corporate goals and have sufficient resources invested to take them across the finish line.

Ensuring you are working on the right projects is the raison d’etre of portfolio management.  If your organization carefully chooses projects that balance risk and reward, short- and long-term returns, novel and established technologies, and new and mature markets, you’ll dramatically increase your chances of creating meaningful growth and delighting more and more customers.

In the webinar below, we review some of the best practices in portfolio management from both a process and a tools perspective. You’ll learn:

  • How little data is required to begin practicing effective portfolio management
  • The operational views of project milestones and funding allocation that effectively summarize your portfolio plans
  • How to perform real-time strategic capacity planning that avoids getting bogged down by details
  • Why variance analysis is the key to delivering portfolio insights, and how to do it
  • How scenario analysis can help you across a wide range of decisions from the most tactical to the most strategic and long-term

 

After the webinar, keep learning with these posts:

  1. Comparing and constrasting with waterfall charts
  2. Portfolio management takes less data (and effort) than you think
  3. Innovation starts with a strategy (right?)
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5 09, 2018

Is Sunk Cost Thinking Dooming Your Innovation Portfolio?

By |2018-09-05T16:00:14-08:00September 5th, 2018|Blog|0 Comments

Photo: Manivasagan N, https://www.dtnext.in

I’ve written many times that portfolio management is about change: changing attitudes, changing tactics, and changing how you invest your limited funds and focus your talented teams. We all know change is difficult, leading us away from a known environment and into an unknown future. But the issue at hand is more than a simple case of the devil you know vs. the devil you don’t.

Sunk cost thinking makes change even more challenging. Once we are working on a project our tendency, as humans, is to keep working on it. This remains true even when we are faced with mounting evidence that the project outcome will not live up to our expectations. We all have an innate tendency to look backwards (at what we’ve invested) while we look forwards (and decide how much more to invest), and this leads us to limit our options time and time again. Consider these individual examples (collected in the fantastic book Essentialism by Greg McKeown): (more…)

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19 07, 2018

Two bar charts you’re probably not using to understand your portfolio

By |2018-07-19T09:29:19-08:00July 19th, 2018|Blog|0 Comments

If I asked you to fill in this blank: Portfolio management uses many ________ charts. You’d probably shout “bubble!” without hesitation. Indeed, frontier charts, pipeline charts, and risk vs. reward charts all effectively employ scatter and bubble charts to describe your portfolio.

But the humble bar chart is no slouch when you’re looking for portfolio insights. In this post I’ll give you two examples you might not be using today. If you already use Enrich Viewport or the Enrich Analytics Platform, then this two-minute video will explain how you can build them, too.

I often say that portfolio management is about value and balance: the value in your portfolio should be aligned with corporate goals across technology platforms, market segments, innovation levels, and even over time (short-term vs. long-term). In order to achieve those goals, the proportions of spending across these dimensions should be set with care so that you ‘place your bets’ to maximize your chances for success.

With this in mind, any chart that helps you see how much you’re spending across technologies, divisions, etc. and also how that spending aligns with anticipated value across those dimensions would be very useful indeed. Enter the contribution analysis! (more…)

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15 05, 2018

One Page Portfolio Management

By |2018-05-16T12:39:08-08:00May 15th, 2018|Blog|2 Comments

We’re often asked for a 35,000 foot view of portfolio management, something that doesn’t delve into every detail, but helps explain to newcomers what portfolio management is about when distilled to its essence. In this blog post we offer up a response to that common question: a one-page flow chart that summarizes the activities of R&D portfolio management.

Keep in mind that we’ve striven to avoid a diagram that includes every contingency because, well, that wouldn’t be helpful as a visual. A few details worth mentioning:

  • We’ve streamlined the flow considerably. In reality there are feedback loops everywhere, and some steps require days/weeks/months of preparation, depending on the specifics of your portfolio.
  • We’ve glossed over the complexities of role-based planning vs. simple budgeting. Dollars and Euros may be fungible, but medicinal chemists can’t be replaced by bioreactor engineers.
  • The distinction of when to prioritize vs. when to optimize isn’t as black-and-white as we portray here. In fact, in the right hands both tools can be used on the same portfolio to deftly explore the possible funding options you might want to present to executives.
  • You may not have a portfolio ‘problem’: If you have committed all your funds, or you have far more funds than you do projects to fund, you may not have many decisions to make.

(more…)

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4 03, 2018

Use Variance Analysis to Identify Key Portfolio Changes

By |2018-03-04T22:38:20-08:00March 4th, 2018|Blog|0 Comments

Variance analysis is a common tool in financial analysis, helping teams compare the cost forecasts and schedules to actual values. In portfolio management, variance analysis is used not only for cost and schedule comparison, but also to track changes in project and portfolio forecasts of value over time.

We’ve written about these features in the Enrich Analytics product suite before in an earlier blog post. Today we’re releasing a video that provides a great overview of the variance reporting features available in both Enrich Viewport and the Enrich Analytics Platform. Let us know what our next video should cover!

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