R&D PORTFOLIO MANAGER

SOFTWARE AND PROCESSES FOR
SUCCESSFUL R&D PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT

What is your challenge as you see it?

”Every investment has to be looked at various dimensions of strategy, spend, execution, priority, resources, all at the same time. As an R&D Portfolio Manager, my challenges relate to consistency of perspectives. By that, what I mean is this: what looks good from a business priority versus spend perspective does not look good from a risk vs. rewards perspective. What looks good from an ROI perspective does not look good from a time to market perspective. One problem is to manage this as a portfolio, by specifying the right flavor that our organization demands, but the other problem is also that I do not have clear guidelines as to how to be sure of the flavor that I select.”

What solutions do you have today?

”Frankly, the word portfolio to us means just a collection of projects. We can group and sort them in terms of strategy, slice them in terms of business units, or slice them in terms of business priority. And we export the data to spreadsheets and take a lot of cross-tab reports and charts manually. We use them in our presentations to Senior Management. We get a picture of our portfolio, but we do not know how to successfully drive towards an optimal portfolio that addresses our constraints and future directions.”

What exactly do you need and why is different?

You need a portfolio governance process that reflects the your risk level, and the spend distribution that matches that, against the expected level of return from different product groups, by what time frame. Your portfolio governance process has to reflect the overall KPI targets that you want to achieve, as represented from domains of strategy, execution, return amidst risks and constraints. Your current initiatives and projects have to be mapped against the overall objectives, so you get an “as is” portfolio. As and when a new opportunity comes in, you can measure how it offsets the blend, and adjust your spend, resources and schedule, and see how it affects your return.

What does OpenMetrik R&D Portfolio Manager do? (What are its features?)

OpenMetrik R&D Portfolio Manager is Intranet web-based, easy-to-access, business role-based solution that gives a multi-dimensional view of your enterprise-wide projects and operational activities as seen from different dimensions. You can see the portfolio against your limit sets and make go/no-go decisions and corrective actions in real-time. You need OpenMetrik R&D Portfolio Manager, which helps optimize and minimize the uncertainties in your R&D New Product Introduction portfolio.

Part of the Bigger Picture…

OpenMetrik Portfolio Manager is part of the overarching GRIP management framework.