Product Portfolio Management (PPM) Research
Apr 25th, 2010 | By Gene A. Wright | Category: Leadership, New Product Management, Technology StrategyFrom PDMA Visions
This study, once again points out how poorly we manage our NPD Projects. We do not seem to think of the collection of projects as a portfolio and do not manage them as such. If we are to achieve our strategic goals for NPD as well as our objectives for each of the projects we have in process, we need to manage them as a portfolio.
Too many projects and poor decision making is at the root cause of poor success rates for both strategic and tactics objectives.
This research connects to a previous post regarding an article by Robert Cooper Cooper Article
What do you think? Am I overly concerned?
This is definitely a concern. We have a portfolio management process that spans two separate SBU’s and we monthly meet to align the portfolio priorities to make best use of our resources. Like many companies we are struggle to find an acceptable balance of short term “order focused” projects, mid and longer term product development projects that support our overall stratgey and on top of that, sharing of engineering resources across two SBU’s is hampered by different architectual “platforms” and distance (Ireland and Wisconsin). We end up with more projects than our Product Managers and Program Managers can support. I am starting to use the Theory of Constraints to look at ways to “throttle” the throughput back to the constraints and then we need to find a way to increase the throughput of the constraints in a way that is budget neutral…..
Bob’s comments from April I thnk are spot on. As an IT Director, I often feel pushed to just get the project done, but managing the portfolio and positioning on multiple levels more holistically provides for longer term ROI and utility. The trick is really assessing the business need, and determining if a short run solution which may yield the desired benefits, was too short run…
What is the reasonable lifecycle and balance of potential system complexities. It certainly is NOT an acceptable answer to address a truly immediate business need with a “gorilla” sized and beuatiful and more complex plan. I like using the constraint theory