Time-to-need: a portfolio tool to balance the time-to-market

The purpose of this paper is to provide a management tool to maximise the effective time-to-market of a portfolio given the competitive monitoring activities.

From the constant monitoring of competition and market needs, it is proposed to define a time-to-need, time when the market may consume the product under development and competitor will not provide a solution before. This time-to-need is proposed to be defined by an expert committee in a periodical meeting of the portfolio. Once it is identified the time-to-need and the time-to-market (project management), it is possible to manage resources in order to maximise the portfolio outputs.

The application of the mentioned approach in an automotive industry showed improvements on number of launched new products per year (double) and on number of patented product launched (four times more).

This approach applies on projects of medium to long term (more than two years) because the resource management can consume set up time. The presented results in this work were based in a single case, which can limit the expected results of the application of this methodology.

This approach enables a constant alignment among experts and a better deployment of resources.

This work provides a practical tool to promote better resource allocation in a portfolio. It can also be an enabler of innovation projects once it finds resources potential to fund the more front end work.