visualization Archives - Enrich Consulting

16 07, 2019

Bullseye Charts for Complex Landscapes

By Rich Sonnenblick|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:

They can accommodate many more market/product segments as arcs around the bullseye than is possible on the y-axis of a pipeline chart
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.

8 08, 2018

Comparing and Contrasting with Waterfall Charts

By Rich Sonnenblick|2018-08-08T15:31:20-08:00August 8th, 2018|Blog|0 Comments

We’ve mentioned waterfall charts in several blog posts, notably posts that focus on scenario and variance analysis. Because we have a number of different ways to generate waterfall views within Enrich Analytics, creating a video that describes ‘all the waterfalls’ has been on our to-do list for some time.

You can see the video for yourself, below. It’s a good refresher, even for those who have used the Enrich Analytics Platform or Enrich Viewport for years. (more…)

19 07, 2018

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

By Rich Sonnenblick|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…)

30 05, 2017

Pareto Charts with Enrich Analytics

By Rich Sonnenblick|2017-06-05T14:39:01-08:00May 30th, 2017|Blog|0 Comments

We’ve offered Pareto charts within both Viewport and the Enrich Analytics Platform for some time now, but haven’t had a chance to pull together a video overview until recently. Clients who build Pareto charts regularly in Excel love the option to build them, with one click, inside Enrich.

Pareto charts are very useful for understanding the distribution of cost and value across your project portfolio. With a Pareto chart you can instantly see whether a few behemoth projects dominate your portfolio, or whether you are experiencing death by a thousand cuts from dozens or hundreds of small projects. Building a portfolio in alignment with strategy requires discipline and focus, and a Pareto chart (or two) can help you see exactly where your ability to focus may be at risk.

At Enrich, we have deep experience helping companies benefit from portfolio management at every level of maturity. From startups with developing patent portfolios to the largest life science companies on the planet, we’ve deployed processes and tools that help them all make better investment decisions. If you’re interested in learning how our tools (Viewport and the Enrich Analytics Platform) can help you level-up on your portfolio management process, drop us a line.

17 02, 2016

7 Views of Project-Portfolio Variance

By Rich Sonnenblick|2017-05-23T15:41:59-08:00February 17th, 2016|Blog|0 Comments

Knowing the current cost and estimated value of every initiative in your portfolio is nice, but when executives meet for a review, what they really want to know is: What’s changed since the last review, was it good or bad, and why?

The above is true whether a month, a quarter, or a year has passed since the last review; looking at what has changed is one of the fastest ways to communicate portfolio health and progress towards strategic goals. It also builds trust in the portfolio process: executives remember where you left off with them, and starting from that same point establishes a feeling of continuity and stability.

In this post I’ll share different methods for communicating variance. These methods have different use cases, but they all riff on the idea of variance. My examples will come from our cloud-based offering, the Enrich Analytics Platform, but you could build similar views by hand in Excel or other self-service BI tools.
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27 01, 2016

Why Choose Enrich Analytics over Traditional BI Tools?

By Rich Sonnenblick|2017-05-23T15:42:00-08:00January 27th, 2016|Blog|0 Comments

R&D teams often try to compare our offering to the many visualization/business intelligence tools available today. At conferences and sales calls, we hear some variant of: “Why should I use Enrich when we already have a site license for Tableau (or Spotfire, Qlik, Cognos, or another BI — business intelligence — tool) at my company?” Were you thinking something similar? Then this blog post is for you!

Tools like Tableau focus on data exploration, and allow you to build various charts to explore a dataset. They are general tools that allow you to construct bubble, bar, and line charts (and many others). However, by themselves, they aren’t up to the more specific, more demanding tasks involved in portfolio management.

If you review the essential activities associated with portfolio management in the diagram below, it will quickly become clear that portfolio management is about more than data exploration. The Enrich Analytics Platform is uniquely suited to provide the analytical, information management, and visualization capabilities necessary for confident, real-time portfolio management.

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12 01, 2016

When Gantt Charts Fail: Use Flag Charts to Show Upcoming Events

By Rich Sonnenblick|2017-05-23T15:42:00-08:00January 12th, 2016|Blog|0 Comments

You’re probably familiar with Gantt charts, which show project tasks, their duration, and their completion dates. For a specific project, project managers and executives use Gantt charts to quickly review upcoming activities.

When reviewing a portfolio of projects, project managers sometimes continue to use Gantt charts, adding upcoming tasks for all projects to a single chart and sorting by task start date. These consolidated Gantt charts are sometimes referred to as ‘key event maps’, because they show key events across a portfolio.

Excerpt from a key event map; when key event maps go on for rows and rows, they are difficult to read.

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1 01, 2014

Bubble Builder: A Free Online App

By Rich Sonnenblick|2017-05-23T15:42:01-08:00January 1st, 2014|Blog|0 Comments

Happy New Year from Enrich!

Looking for a way to create life-cycle and annotated bubble charts from your portfolio data set? Bubble Builder is a free online app from Enrich that you can use to create bubble charts quickly and easily. Just paste your data from Excel directly into your browser and click the ‘Chart Data’ button. You can select the data columns to use for each axis, as well as for bubble size and bubble color. Additional controls let you

annotate the chart with a label for each item,
overlay the chart with median values,
sum items in each category,
fine tune the axis ranges, and
sum data for items in each category.

Create charts like this in seconds with Bubble Builder

With Bubble Builder, you can build traditional bubble charts as well as ‘category’ bubble charts (like the one pictured on the right) that use data fields such as ‘Program Status’ or ‘Program Phase’ to classify your projects. These types of charts have long been the bane of portfolio analysts, because they can’t be built easily in Excel but are in high demand by executives.

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