To hit the target, you first need to choose a target. This three-part blog aims toward sparking a discussion of the importance of focus in our work. Please join the conversation!
A few years ago when speaking with an R&D manager who led a team of five people, I asked how many active projects her group had and she responded, “We have a strong portfolio with 205 projects.” I had a similar discussion with a manager at another company and he said, “We now have a focused portfolio of 125 projects; that’s great progress from the 225 projects we had to start the year.”
The ‘focused portfolio’ of 125 sounded better than the one with 205 or more projects, but I found out that neither of these portfolios were properly focused.
There is no single correct answer for how many projects to pursue, because the number of projects to include in your portfolio depends on variables such as: the size of the group, the magnitude of the technical or commercial challenges, window of opportunity, strategy of the company (leader vs. fast-follower), and more. As these variables change, so will the proper number of projects.
I’ve been asked why we should limit the number of projects. The answer I give is that by focusing on fewer projects, you can work faster and with greater depth on the ones that you prioritize. If a chemist has 40 projects (!) they can only spend an hour on each one per week, and that is if they have nothing else to do (eg, time for travel, safety, reading, meetings, etc.). In reality, many projects will get 0-15 minutes of attention during the week. Even the projects that do get attention will be pursued at a cursory level with too little technical depth to deliver true competitive advantage. That translates into no progress or slow progress on me-too products, and that strategy can be deadly in a world where competitors strive to beat you.
So far, I’ve only discussed this issue in terms of the number of projects for the R&D group, but the reality is that these are not just R&D projects, they are business projects. Even if we triple the size of the R&D group, our problem of too many projects does not go away. We only shift the bottleneck in the system. Every new product that is developed needs to go through a regulatory review, and it needs to be scaled to the manufacturing plant, and then someone in sales or marketing needs to promote and sell it to the customer, and often that will require customer trials. Unless we have addressed all of these steps in the process, we will not have solved the capacity problem.
Let me know what you think, and stay tuned for Part II on Focus where I will discuss how size matters.
