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Rating: 
Summary: Badly needed guidance on a risky area of business
Review: Developing new industrial and commercial products is one of the most expensive and risky tasks facing management. New product development is bound to be difficult because new technology or new markets are always involved. Risk in selecting new projects for R&D to spend the company's money on can be managed in a similar way to managing financial investments. You assemble a portfolio, which is collection of investments (i.e. projects) having thought-out risks and an estimated probability of meeting your requirements. This book shows you how. Cooper's team in Canada have been working on new product management for over 20 years and they are the world experts.
Rating: 
Summary: No theory behind an incomplete collection of case studies!!
Review: Huge disappointment. Chapter 1, page 1 starts with "Those
companies that succeed at new product dvelopment are the future
Mercks, HPs, 3Ms, and Microsofts; those companies that fail to excel
at developing new products will invariably disappear or be gobbed up
by the winners. .....". Despite this quite promising catch
phrase you will not find a single word on how the above mentioned
companies develope new products.Things actually get worse. What you
will find in this book are random generated case studies on various
portfolio models the authors encountered in the few firms willing to
meet them - no theoretical framework is given on portfolio management,
criteria to be included and best practices in various industries. As
a major disappointment I found the fact that not a single case/best
practise study came from the pharmaceutical industry and the software
industry, those industries where portfolio management/selection are at
the very heart of the strategic management process. It would have been
a huge (and logical) opportunity to cover in this book how Merck or
Pfizer steer their new product development processes. But don`t look
for clues to this questions in this book. The case studies you will
find in this book are about a small Canadian bank, a small US chemical
company, and about Hoechst US. The last case study offered at least
some ideas useful for improving the portfolio management process (that
is the main reason for the second star). Somewhat disturbing are
platidudes widely used throughout the book (e.g. " ....Remember:
understanding the problem is the first step to a solution!
.... (p. 184)). If esclamation marks after platitudes make you
nervous, then you will probably throw this book away before reaching
page 100. The only bright side of this book are the first 20 pages,
where the authors discribe present shortfalls of the portfolio
management process currently used in some firms (i.e. in the firms
they interview, and these firms are underperformers). It helps to get
an idea of what effective portfolio management should do - and these
points are very agreeable indeed (e.g. value creation, balance,
strategic fit). That these questions are inadequeately and only
empirically adressed in this book, is a source of frustration for its
readers. I would give only a very very weak recommendation for this
book....
databaseU
Rating:
Summary: An analysis of current thinking in portfolio management
Review: In this text, the authors thoroughly review the methods currently being practiced in companies to make decisions about their investments in new products and technologies, and the success of these various methods. They recognize the difficulties of making such decisions, especially by relying on simple processes without understanding shorfalls of the process and the robustness of the data. They focus on the goals of maximizing value, achieving a balanced portfolio and linking the decisions to business strategy. They tie this process into other key processes in the company, including the product development process and the new product strategy. By far the most valuable aspect of the book, however, is the link between process and real operation provided by the "Points for Management to Ponder" commentary which runs throughout the book. This is a current, encyclopedic and practical guide to this very difficult business process.
Rating: 
Summary: Actionable approach and excellent reference
Review: The purpose of this book is to provide the reader with an actionable approach for implementing a product-oriented project portfolio management process which corporate leaders can use to ensure that the organization's portfolio delivers value, is balanced, and is aligned with strategy.
While the book addresses product-oriented projects, it seems well suited to limited generalization to aid the non-product based project portfolio. The Thesis
The authors state that a portfolio process is key to success since projects operationalize strategy. To determine how well organizations manage their product project portfolio, they evaluate leader satisfaction with the process the organization uses along six metrics:
•Projects aligned with business's objectives
•Portfolio contains very high value projects
•Spending reflects the business's strategy
•Projects are done on time (no gridlock)
•Portfolio has good balance of projects
•Portfolio has right number of projects While I think this is a good list for any project portfolio manager to begin using, I note that this survey is simply a ranking of leader satisfaction with leaders in organizations which use portfolio management. The authors did not try to link leader satisfaction with business success. It is difficult to prove that portfolio management led to business success, but one might assert that a measure of portfolio management on business is not fair because what one is really measuring is strategy success. The goal of portfolio management then might be stated as alignment with strategy, not business success. I think an organizational survey asking senior leaders to rank satisfaction along the six metrics might be interesting - how many of the questions can they answer at all? Presumably, knowing the answers and being dissatisfied with them might be better than not knowing the answers. Actionable Information
This book is well organized and appears well researched. This is not surprising given that it was written by academic professionals. What is a little surprising, given the authors' profession, is that is so thoroughly action-oriented. The authors never seem to loose sight of the fact that if portfolio management is to help an organization it must be implemented. Over and over again, they point out pitfalls, limitations, cautions, and implementation steps for overcoming these. I expect to use this book often to fill in the gaps in other approaches, leaning heavily on the best-practice implementation suggestions they authors recommend in suggestions tailored to specific goals. Among the useful, researched insights was this one: "Those businesses that use financial models as the dominant portfolio selection method end up with the poorest-performing portfolios!" (p 169). One reason for this (in product portfolios) is that the sophistication of the financial tools exceeds the quality of the predictive value data. Conversely, businesses that rely principally on strategic models outperform the rest. Allocating resources to strategic areas seems to work well, and we are reminded that "strategy begins when you start spending money" (Ibid). Conclusion
Many books are over-blown magazine articles. This is not one of those books. The authors did a lot of plain hard work bringing this book together and it shows. They authors never forget that someone must sell the notion of portfolio management to senior leaders, then provide them with specific, relevant and actionable information to make difficult and important project decisions with strategic impact. I appreciate the fact that the authors frequently provide suggestions on how to keep thinks simple, starting small and scaling sophistication as processes are prototyped, then refined and adapted in specific organizations. There is a possible limitation in how appropriately one may generalize these approaches to non-product-oriented project portfolios. This book does such a good job talking about project portfolio management that the reader can forget at times that the book is about product project portfolio management. It may be that some of the research findings do not apply or cannot be generalized with validity to other types of project portfolios. The reader should keep his grain of salt handy. However, there are still too few project portfolio management books available, especially books based on research, so this is a very useful reference. By way of balance, it does not seem too far a stretch to use this book for other, non-product project portfolio management since the aim of the process is to align projects with strategy, obtain high value from projects, and obtain a balanced portfolio of projects. These are good goals for any portfolio, and organizations are free to define and measure dimensions however they wish.
Possibly the highest compliment I can pay the authors is to say that having read the book, my copy is full of underlined passages and pages encumbered with sticky-notes. This book will not gather much dust on my shelf - at least not for quite some time.
Rating:
Summary: Valuable addition to the management of new products.
Review: The resources invested in producing and supporting new products in markets provide, on average, a poor return on investment (see the research of Cooper and others on this topic). Managing across a portfolio of products adds a degree of complexity to the task of being successful with each individual product. This book provides the essential information for management to understand the fundamentals of a rational, process based approach to managing new products.
Rating:
Summary: Helpful tool for improving strategic new product management
Review: This is a good guide to help senior managers [1] to decide which new products to progress and [2] to decide how much resources to allocate to those products. It's a good overview and pracical guide, based on research, to doing the job better.
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