🏢 TNO portfolio management: How to decide what is worth our time?

For TNO, a company that does research into future technologie, we did a project about the way they decide what projects are worth their time and what projects are not. This is called portfolio management. The goal of the project was to find a way to improve their portfolio management. We did this by interviewing employees and analyzing the data we collected. We then made a report with our findings and recommendations. The report was presented to the board of directors of TNO.

The project was done in a small team of 5 people. We started off with a literature study about portfolio management and found out that every company takes a different approach. That is why we decided to interview employees from TNO to find out how they do portfolio management. We interviewed employees from different departments and with different roles. We asked them about their role in portfolio management, how they decide what projects are worth their time and what projects are not, and what they think about the current portfolio management process. We also asked them about their vision on the future of portfolio management.

At the same time we got lectures from the course Entrepreneurial innocation by design. These lectures were about how to design a company that stimulates innovation. We learned about C-K theory and realised that this theory could be used to improve the portfolio management process. We created a new funnel that incorporates C-K theory and is iterable. This means that a project can be send back to the beginning of the funnel if it is not ready to be send to the next stage. This way the project can be improved and it is not lost or stuck, which happens in the current funnel. With some added features, like a way to measure the progress of a project, this funnel can be used to improve the portfolio management process.