Case Studies
Portfolio Analysis
A company’s portfolio has an uncanny habit of growing. Growing as companies grow, growing as customer demands change, growing to take advantage of new technologies. But R&D budgets are limited, and the capacity of the company to continue to service mature offerings can be restricted over time. Understanding your portfolio and categorising your offerings into core and non-core, market leading or market following, opportunities to invest or opportunities to divest is critical. Determining migration and product retirement strategies are as important as launching new offerings to meet changing market demands.
BWCS has developed a proprietary method which enables a company to categorise products and services into a solutions framework which fits with your corporate and marketing strategy. The resulting framework can be used to communicate what the solutions do for your customers, how they are to be developed and where there are opportunities to be more efficient in development funding. Our framework enables the sales teams to provide targeted feedback, guiding your R&D efforts to match the demands of the market. Our deliverables include roadmaps for individual portfolio elements, highlighting how the efforts of your R&D teams must be directed to truly drive your products forwards and deliver competitive advantage.
BWCS worked with a major European defence and security player to rationalise a portfolio of offerings which had grown up independently in four national markets. Our deliverable was a durable framework within which offerings could be categorised and easily communicated, and future development planned. Where there was duplication and overlap between different national offerings, we identified market leading elements to support difficult prioritisation decisions. Often these were operational methodologies – rather than clever bits of code – and highlighting the competitive advantage created in this way was a key finding. Our financial analysis of the companies past and planned performance enabled investment decisions to be based on future revenues, rather than the development teams’ technology ambitions, and our roadmaps provided the framework for managing implementation.
"As a result of the work BWCS performed on portfolio development and portfolio management, I can say with confidence that any engagement with BWCS can be relied upon to display:
- real, relevant subject matter expertise
- well thought through methodologies and structure
- clear outcomes and deliverables
- genuine personal commitment from all of their team members"
Mike Simms, Head of IS Solutions & Services, Cassidian Systems