Roadmaps & Portfolios

Your portfolio or roadmap represents your strategic plan for the future. This strategy becomes real when you start spending money – funding new projects this year and next.

Portfolio management helps you make the right investment decisions – balancing project priorities with overall portfolio risk and support across your innovation objectives.

Our software provides an easy way to select a set of projects in your portfolio to their prioritized scores. View the resources required for your selection, compared to the total resources available.  Then visualize the balance of your proposed portfolio.

Without a plan, your innovation strategy will probably fail. Roadmapping is the best approach to create, visualize and communicate your strategic plan to senior management and the teams responsible for execution.

Attempting to roadmap with tools like PowerPoint, Excel or even MS Project is a thankless task, so many organizations give up. The data is simply too dynamic, interlinked and rich to be managed in that way.

Our software make it easy to build and manage your innovation roadmaps. Start by creating simple product roadmaps, laying out the future vision for your solutions to market. Add a technology roadmap, identifying enabling technologies needed to win. Finally add innovation objectives and targeted customer segments, showing how your innovation strategy aligns to business goals.

Our roadmaps can also automatically synchronize with detailed projects in our Project module – creating a project directly from the roadmap, and then updating roadmaps from detailed project plans and latest status. This enables both top-down & bottom-up planning and tracking of your project portfolio.

Innovation strategy becomes real when you start funding projects. So how can you ensure funding is properly balanced across projects to achieve your goals?

Strategic funding buckets solve this problem. A funding bucket is an annual spending limit of money or headcount that can be used to fund differ project categories, such as targeted innovation newness categories, market segments and strategic arenas.

Our software enables you to define strategic buckets aligned to innovation objectives. Allocate total available budget & headcount across buckets according to agreed targets. Identify project portfolios that can be funded from each bucket. Prioritize and fund projects from buckets until the spending limit has been reached.

A long range plan of resource supply & demand will reveal if you are trying to do too much with too few of the necessary resources.

Resource planning using spreadsheets is very time consuming – keeping resource demand aligned as projects shift in time or resource requirements change.

Our software enables you to quickly define a portfolio resource capacity plan, and easily adjust it as circumstances change. Start by defining the availability of different resource types for that portfolio. Then estimate resource demand for each portfolio project. The system then displays supply vs demand, highlighting where your resources are overloaded. Then you can simply adjust the plan and the system will automatically recalculate resource loading, enabling you to resolve bottlenecks and make use of unallocated supply.

Many businesses struggle to estimate the value of their proposed innovation strategy, and its contribution to corporate growth goals.

Sometimes this is attempted by adding together financial forecasts of your current R&D projects. But this gives no insight into your longer term innovation strategy and the trade-off decisions of investment vs. return that can be made.

Our financial forecasting capability enables you to quickly estimate financial cash flows for any project in your portfolio, out to the foreseeable planning horizon for your business. This provides a baseline to test the assumptions behind the value of each element. Crucially, it also provides the basis for discussion with business units about the impact of innovation on their growth goals, and the level of investment required.

With a good ideation process, most businesses have more candidate projects than they have money or people to deliver.  So they have to prioritize – deciding which projects to fund or not.

The best way to do this is using scorecards – sets of scaled scoring criteria to calculate each project’s relative attractiveness.

Our software provides pre-configured prioritization scorecards as recommended by the Product Development Institute.  These scorecards are calibrated to meet your business drivers and then each roadmapped project is scored. The system then calculates an overall project attractiveness score to prioritize and rank projects.

Your portfolio represents a snapshot of your innovation strategy. As your business plans evolve, your portfolios & roadmaps will need to evolve as well.

You may also need to consider alternate scenarios – asking what if our markets, business goals or funding changes? How should we respond?

Our software helps you create roadmap baselines, to track how plans change month-by-month and communicate updates to stakeholders. Take roadmap versions, to model alternate strategies based on different assumptions of the future. Versioning can also be used to prepare multiple iterations during the annual budgeting process, as companies fine-tune their investment commitments for the coming year.

A plan is useless until people understand it.  So communicating your roadmaps and portfolios effectively is critical to implementing innovation strategy.

Our software calculates the key metrics and presents your roadmap & portfolio information in graphical dashboards.  It can then distribute this information automatically via email, in PDF or PowerPoint format.    Use this information to agree priorities with business partners, communicate performance targets for your R&D organization, update everyone on current status, and review opportunities to optimize the roadmap or portfolio for maximum impact.