Improve Proposal & Pipeline Management

Unless project selection is random, the physics of pipelines presents you with a terrible dilemma. Pushing more projects thought your pipeline increases output, but it increases downstream attrition as well. As pipeline throughput increases, portfolio ROI decreases.

Meanwhile, in Phase-Gate systems, current PPM practices assume that the gates' attrition rates are independent of each other. Unless project selection is random, this assumption is wrong. Project selection upstream strongly affects downstream attrition and results. The false assumption is harmful. Many PPM plans push projects into the front of the pipeline only to create problems downstream.

Star DS's new model and metrics will help you manage these problems. They will help you:

• Identify infeasible plans
  PPM plans that require high throughput while assuming low attrition rates are infeasible. They violate pipeline physics and will fail. Star DS is developing a metric that will identify infeasible plans before you invest in false hopes.
• Manage a pipeline successfully
  Star DS is developing metrics that add a pull mechanism to the current push approach to pipeline management. With these new metrics, you can place your goals at the end of your pipeline, and the metrics will guide your pipeline management to achieve your goals.

The metrics described above will help you manage the trade-off between throughput and ROI, but you will want to relax the trade-off. Three strategies can relax the trade-off: (1) improving project evaluation and selection, (2) improving proposal processes and (3) improving project management. Star DS is developing metrics to improve project evaluation and selection. Additionally, the new PPM model can improve proposal processes the following ways:

• Improving proposal processes
  Star DS is developing metrics that show the impact of proposal processes on PPM. Of course, they also show the impact of improvements to proposal processes and the results of focusing proposal processes on particular opportunities. For example, the metrics can help pharmaceutical executives decide whether to focus on strategic opportunities or to allow scientists to pursue their own ideas.