Portfolio Management
Product development organizations strive to balance product portfolios to achieve the ideal R&D product pipeline, but without easy access to up-to-date information on product benefits, risks, costs and resource demands, many organizations are flying blind when it comes to making critical product prioritization and selection decisions.
Many industry reports have highlighted the need that in order to deliver the greatest return on investments, manufacturers must be more selective in their product development projects. In addition, they must provide better visibility and control to those projects as they mature.
If you need further evidence for the importance of this issue, research estimates that, on average, cash invested in New Product Development Life-cycle (NPDL) is 10-20% of revenue that management can and must control better.
Typically, organizations that experience the following challenges are good candidates for improving their program and portfolio management capabilities.
- Missed product delivery deadlines
- An inability to prioritize the most important projects
- A lack of visibility to evolving program risks
- Skilled R&D resources working excessive overtime
- Loss of customers due to poor resource planning
Traditional means of managing New Product Development Life-cycle data consist of fragmented tools leading to inconsistent information across functions. The typical collection of spreadsheets, project plans, archived emails and countless dispersed documents are a sure recipe for bad product development decisions.
Forward-thinking organizations are adopting a collaborative information system that combines the functions of investment planning, portfolio analysis, program and project management, risk management and resource planning that brings this information together in a single repository and is accessed by cross-functional product teams and decision-makers.
This approach directly links top-down strategic and product planning with bottom-up program management and execution so that decisions are based on accurate and trusted information and development resources are focused on the right programs at the right time.
Does your organization spend valuable time updating spreadsheets and in meetings trying to correlate conflicting data? Are inconsistent processes and terminology making things harder? Then perhaps its time that you look at a common platform for new product development.
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