There are many questions you regularly ask yourself as you manage your own financial portfolio: Should I invest more or less in this mutual fund? Should I allocate more to my 401k? Should I put less money here and more money there? What should my risk profile be?
These are similar questions companies ask themselves as they manage their own product and project portfolios. Especially in large organizations, these questions are perpetually difficult to answer. Even with portfolio management tools and well defined business processes, blind spots exist and political bias exerts itself. Sacred cows that should be put to rest live on and on, wasting valuable resources.
Using Inkling Markets to strengthen your portfolio management process means asking questions about upcoming quarterly and annual key performance metrics for each project or product in your portfolio. The output from these questions will give you valuable data to make mid-course changes throughout the fiscal year and will also inform your annual budgeting process.
In Research & Development groups, the perpetual challenge in managing the portfolio is where to allocate resources. What are the right bets to be making on research projects that will eventually make their way in to products versus those that will not? What research should be funded versus not funded? What prototypes should move from R&D to production? Here are some sample questions a company recently asked about their research portfolio:
| Question | Chances |
|---|---|
| Will the feasibility analysis show the new system can be built for less than $650/unit? | 26% |
| Which new prototype will get the highest score in quality testing? | 22% |
| Will research project X make it in to a product line by 2012? | 89% |
Understanding the predictions to these questions gives the business units actionable information to more effectively direct the R&D portfolio. Focus and resources can be placed on those projects with the highest likelihood of success and those deemed less likely of success can either receive more resources or be shelved or minimized.
In addition to these quantitative expressions of opinion, we encourage participants to express themselves in words, so companies get insight in to why employees are predicting one way or another. Why will a new feature be so expensive to mass produce? Why is one idea to solve a problem better than another? Further, every question asked is accompanied by a discussion forum where people often share new information.
Each time you gain actionable information that helps you decide to support one concept or another, or shelve an effort earlier than you would have if you didn't have a strong signal from your Inkling marketplace, we're saving you money or potentially increasing your revenues.
