DECISION SUPPORT FOR PORTFOLIO OPTIMIZATION

Optimizing product (or service) development investments involves too many design and development trade-offs for the human brain to process without analytics for decision support. Even with a methodology like Strategic Harmony® that streamlines and simplifies comparisons between development initiatives, there are at minimum hundreds of trade-offs that must be rolled up into aggregate, weighted views. That’s where our decision support software tool comes in.

Core Strategic Harmony® metrics, dashboards, scorecards, and quadrant mapping have been integrated into the tool that SHP uses to support its methodology for portfolio/product/service optimization. It serves four distinct purposes.

First, it is a repository for gathering the most useful decision criteria (customer experience / brand choice criteria, competitive impact considerations, commercialization cost and risk factors, and sustainability criteria) for evaluating new products, services, technology investments, or new product features and functions.

Second, it provides an efficient integrative platform for collaboration, so that consensus on development priorities can be easily driven across each client’s cross-functional teams as they evaluate alternative innovation investments.

Third, it provides visual, otherwise-missed insights into the relative strategic strengths and weaknesses of alternative development investments (see the list of scorecards and charting analytics at right), converting informed judgments to quantitative outputs in carefully structured contexts.

Finally, it provides an effective mechanism for weighting different components of the total analysis. These weighting factors also serve as springboards for crucial discussions around the relative importance of perfecting customer experience, marginalizing specific competitors, reducing development costs, mitigating risks, and boosting supply chain resilience and environmental performance.