Portfolio Management
One of the most dramatic ways of improving the return of your R&D investments is to do the "right projects". Portfolio management is the discipline of balancing all your product management resources and skills to achieve optimum strategic, financial and operational impact across all product lines in all life cycle phases.
This is done by choosing better and different innovation projects to invest in, moving away from low value and low strategically aligned projects toward higher value and better aligned ones. Portfolio Management is about better budget and resource allocations and helps answering to how your company can more effectively invest in R&D. By providing your managers with a strategic and operational vision over the company's R&D projects, it will helps them to improve their portfolio decision making and shorten product cycle times.
Like for many other companies, Portfolio Management can become for you a real competitive advantage.
| The IFT offering is the only software solution to provide in one single integrated solution "best in class" New Product Development practices and functionality: 1. Portfolio and Idea Management n At strategic level: alignment, product & technology roadmapping, financial planning, capacity planning n At tactical level : idea & initiative mgmt, financial value, priorities, balance, budget & resource management 2. Stage-Gate Process n Business Case, Evaluation and Scoring, Go/Hold/Kill, resource allocation, deliverable tracking n Repeatable, reliable, measurable, auditable 3. Project Management n Execution: planning & scheduling, matrix resource management, cost control, risk & progress monitoring |
| Key Capabilities IFT's solution provides key stakeholders of the Portfolio Management process with the following tools, all integrated in a single, user-friendly environment: |
Matrix charts: are used to analyze a portfolio according to different dimensions for comparison, prioritization and arbitrage purposes. These charts display each project according to two dimensions such as risk vs. rewards, technical newness vs. market newness, competitive strength vs. market attractiveness, etc. The size of the bubbles can represent an additional dimension such as forecasted cost of the project, while its color can indicate its current status (proposal, approved, etc…). Matrices allow decision makers to understand if the portfolio is well balanced and, for example, encourage new project candidates in areas where they are not in sufficient number or value. | |
Funnels charts: are used to analyze a portfolio according to its progress in the development process. As with Matrix charts, the size of the bubble and its color can be configured to give additional information. Funnels allow decision makers to measure how the overall NPD process is performing. Do we have enough ideas at the discovery stage? Are we killing enough of them along the way to allow the most performing ones to succeed? Do we have too many of them at the same stage which will prevent us from achieving any by lack of resources? | |
Scorecards: enable decision makers to compare projects according to multiple standardized criteria: financial indicators | |
Simulations: managing a portfolio includes anticipating future problems and reacting quickly to the unexpected: decreasing sales potential, new competitor entering the market, delay in project, cost increases, priority changes, etc. The IFT solution allows you to change any parameters of the project and of the portfolio, investigate as many scenarios as needed and compare the different simulation results at any point in time. | |
Efficient frontier: our system's algorithmic will automatically select projects and calculate a graph showing the maximum return for any given level of investment, based on the available projects in the portfolio. | |
| Roadmaps: are used to better understand and |
Financial planning and management: putting your R&D investments under strategic and financial control involves implementing specific financial process which ERPs cannot easily support without heavy customizations. The IFT solution provides ready-to-use and powerful features in this areas like: | |
Dashboards: combine multiple key performance indicators to offer a complete vision of the portfolios health: bubble diagrams, scorecards, funnels, financial curves, resource histograms, multi-dimensional radars, planning barcharts, threshold reports, etc. |






