• Workshop A: (AM Half-Day)
  Aligning Allocating and Acquiring the Right Skills for a Resource Limited Environment
• Workshop B: (AM Half-Day)
  Strategic Tools for R&D Project Selection and Structure
• Workshop C: (PM Half-Day)
  Improving Portfolio and Pipeline Throughput with Dynamic Resource Allocation
• Workshop D: (PM Half-Day)
  Probabilistic Resource Accounting: Generating High Confidence Staffing Plans for the Uncertain World of R&D

How can you, as a leader, set the best portfolio of projects for your company’s future if you don’t have a clear picture of how those projects will be resourced? From your employee’s standpoint, why would highly skilled professionals join or stay in an organization where their forward skills path is unclear?

To rapidly make the transition from a company constantly in "skills panic" to a company of "skills advantage", you need the right focus and tools to diversify your specialists within a lean staffing environment.

The first step to meet these challenges is to define your portfolio’s "skills demand" – the skills required to meet your needs now, in one year and in 3 years. Once the demand is set, you must objectively inventory the skills your employees have and set a clear training, job experience and partnering course to get the ones you need.

In this highly interactive workshop, participants will learn about and use a proven skills tool to:

1. Help sort out the "critical few" skills needed for your future
2. Develop a set of simple Excel-based "skills matrixes" for major job functions
3. Distribute the matrixes and combine the returned data simply and efficiently
4. Use the combined data to define group training needs, individual development actions and outside hiring and partnering requirements

Key take-aways from this session include:

1. A menu of best practice skills from industry leaders
2. A process to develop skills matrixes for any job type
3. A process to simply and efficiently use skills matrixes in their organization
4. Review of a case study, step by step, of one organization’s journey to better organization skills

Wayne Mackey
Principal
Product Development Consulting, Inc.

Mr. Mackey has been a Principal with Product Development Consulting, Inc. since 1997. Prior to joining PDC, he worked in industry for 20 years in high tech, aerospace and automotive fields. He has been a keynote speaker and invited conference chairman for topics in rapid organizational change and metrics. Mr. Mackey has presented at each of the prior six Management Roundtable metrics conferences and chaired the first two. He has a BS in Electrical Engineering and Economics from Carnegie Mellon University and an MS in Engineering from Loyola Marymount University.

Two of the largest challenges for R&D are to design the best R&D organizational structure and to select which projects to fund. Project selection is a critical lever in increasing the effectiveness of the research function in technology-driven companies. In this workshop, we will explore a new framework, Strategic Flexibility, for project selection and portfolio design. Strategic Flexibility applies the insights of Real Options theory and makes them practically applicable, recognizing the need to manage limited resources and maintain the flexibility to refine the research strategy through time.

This session will also examine how to build R&D Centers of Excellence. Beyond an operational decision, creating Centers of Excellence requires a review of the organizations’ overall business and research strategies, as well as an analysis of what operational structure will support these strategies.

By participating in this workshop, you will learn:

• About the limitations of existing project selection frameworks
• How to apply the Strategic Flexibility framework to your project selection and portfolio design process
• Different strategies and frameworks for organizing R&D efforts and creating R&D Centers of Excellence
• How to align R&D processes and tools to your operational R&D structure

Throughout the workshop the instructors will illustrate frameworks of practical examples drawn from real case experiences with leading R&D organizations.

Ximena Leroux
Deloitte Consulting

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Brian Meeker
Deloitte Consulting

Companies who depend on a stream of product development initiatives to fuel growth and renewal are becoming much more aware of the importance of managing resources across that stream of initiatives. It's important at the outset when portfolio decisions are made and it's important throughout development as companies seek to manage the pipeline of projects against a dynamically shifting set of resource needs and constraints.

Many companies have taken the first steps toward better resource management by getting a handle on resource assignments (knowing who is assigned to which projects), and by rationalizing aggregate resource demand and capacity (avoiding overload by initiating projects only when there are resources to complete them). This has helped many to improve throughput but still leaves a great deal of opportunity to fine tune resource assignments and scheduling with resource demand at a more granular level. The ultimate goal for many would be the ability to dynamically allocate and reallocate resources to projects as schedules and priorities shift, without undue management overhead and without causing experience churn that disrupts and slows project progress.

This workshop is intended to explore practical ways achieve this kind of dynamic resource allocation. Specific sub-topics include:

• Understanding portfolio and pipeline resource management challenges
• Assessing the cost of poor portfolio and pipeline resource management
• Stages of maturity in resource management and requirements for each stage
• Getting a basic utilization management capability in place by managing assignments
• Aggregate supply/demand balancing or pipeline loading, avoiding macro bottlenecks before they occur
• Dynamic supply/demand resource allocation (resource requirements planning)
• Information and IT requirements for dynamic resource allocation
• Process and organization requirements for dynamic resource allocation
• Implementation tips and lessons learned

The workshop will use a combination of hands on exercises to illustrate key concepts as well as roundtable discussions to maximize knowledge sharing and group learning.

Mark Deck
Director
PRTM

Mark Deck, Atlantic Region Lead Director, PRTM Consulting, has over 20 years of consulting experience on the management & development of new products. His expertise includes accelerating development and launch of major new products and establishing processes for setting strategy, balancing product portfolios and allocating resources.

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Vineet Dalal
Principal
WW Product Development Practice
PRTM

Vineet Dalal, Principal, PRTM Consulting, has expertise in designing & implementing business and market entry strategies, technology development processes, and program & portfolio decision-making processes.

How full is your R+D pipeline? How thin are your resources spread? Do you have a good accounting of the work in progress? Can you say with any certainty what you’ll need next quarter? Next month? Next week?

Planning for uncertainty in resource capacity and demand is an often overlooked step when developing staffing plans. Yet attention to this uncertainty can really pay off when incorporated into your overall pipeline and portfolio management process.

In this workshop, you will examine resource planning from a probabilistic perspective. You will investigate the factors that influence resource capacity and apply proven techniques to assess likely resource demands. At the same time, you will gain an understanding of the uncertainty inherent in those demands.

At the end of this workshop, you will be able to:

• Identify the information you need to generate a robust resource plan
• Generate a realistic accounting of resource capacity
• Develop a probabilistic estimate of resource demands
• Communicate resource needs more effectively

Mark Durrenberger
Principal
Oak Associates

Mark Durrenberger is a founding principal of Oak Associates, Inc., a project management consulting and training firm based in Maynard, Massachusetts. Mark has fifteen years of experience managing IT, high-technology new product development, and organizational change projects in large corporations. Since Oak’s establishment in 1997, Mark has published several articles on project management tools and techniques and given a number of talks on a variety of project management topics.