26th Edition
Strategic Project & Portfolio Management for Pharma
Drive continuous value delivery through efficient processes and alignment of portfolio management with strategic objectives
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What are the most significant challenges faced when integrating advanced data management tools into existing PPM processes?
Setting up portfolio management software can be a bit bumpy, going through major implementation reworks, adapting to new platform caused by new reporting lines. Several off-the-shelf options exist that benefit from experience and development across several sponsors, although always showing some integration or application limitations. Building internal software solutions may be better integrated with other systems and easier to adapt provided resources are available. Implementation failures or extensive reworks are frequently caused by the absence of a global data strategy within the division and limited vision. Departmental initiatives will soon be confronted with interoperability issues with evolving systems of other departments, or emerging new applications (eg. AI/ML). More global initiatives confront the need to convince executive boards of large investments, without having strong ROI analysis available due to long horizons and relevance of indirect benefits difficult to precisely quantify. An inspired Data-Fabric leader, supported with the right level of expertise and empowerment, will overcome the many technical roadblocks like data-silos integration, interoperability, standardization and quality, security, scalability and performance.
How has the increasing complexity of pharmaceutical project portfolios impacted the ability of companies to align projects with strategic objectives?
Increasing complexity and costs in pharmaceutical project portfolios emerge as new technological platforms (mRNA, ADC, ..) and personalized medicine become available, often less mature and with higher uncertainty, but creating new opportunities to tackle difficult indications and new opportunities to reach growth and strategic objectives. Regulations requirements evolve and competitive pressures bring disruption to development plans. Adapting the organization to the changing environment involves tensions in resource allocations, delayed or missed opportunities, leading to unbalanced portfolio. Thorough and regular portfolio reviews, together with autonomous and decentralized conflict resolutions, contribute to managing the level of complexity at Governance level while allowing flexible and timely reactions to risks and opportunities. Such change in the risk profile of pharmaceutical opportunities has favored higher weights of blockbusters in projects portfolio and higher volatility in sales when facing project progression failure.
Ahead of the 26th Edition Strategic Project & Portfolio Management for Pharma conference we spoke with Edouard Ledent, Director - R&D Strategy & Portfolio - Decision Sciences at GSK, Belgium. Ed is Decision Sciences Director at GSK within Vaccines Portfolio Decision Sciences, Portfolio Management & RD Strategy. He led for the last 12 years the process aiming at assessing Probability of Technical and Regulatory Success for vaccine and infectious disease projects and facilitates governance review. His interactions involve a broad range of functions including R&D, Commercial, Finance and Project Manager. He contributes to project prioritization through scientifically and financially sound business options. Previously, he contributed as clinical statistician along a broad range of projects, from clinical pharmacology studies to registration and filing, across GSK, Eli Lilly and UCB Pharma.
27-29 January, 2025
Radisson Blu Hotel Frankfurt, Germany
Edouard will be presenting a case study during day two of the 26th Edition Strategic Project & Portfolio Management for Pharma conference!
For registration pricing and multiple attendee discounts, please contact:
Ria Kiayia
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Interested? Do you feel you will benefit?
An interview with Edouard Ledent, Director - R&D Strategy & Portfolio - Decision Sciences at GSK, Belgium
Case study: Enhance Portfolio and Decision Analysis for Therapeutic Areas
- Facilitate decision analysis with project teams to frame and evaluate investment options within therapeutic areas.
- Coordinate valuation and prioritisation processes to determine strategic focus and resource allocation for these therapeutic areas.
- Boost portfolio governance, long-range planning, and business development efforts to align with organisational goals.
- Spearhead the development and adoption of advanced tools to enhance analytical capabilities and decision-making processes.
To what extent do inefficient portfolio governance practices hinder value creation and decision-making in pharmaceutical project portfolio management (PPM)?
Efficient portfolio governance implies difficult trade-offs between multiple lenses pertinent to project management: (1) Proper governance framework will help focus on strategic projects and streamline resources, although flexibility in stage-gate thresholds will open to some opportunistic bets. (2) Discipline across various accountabilities, together with effective and efficient consolidation through analytics, will limit idle time between development phases and protect project value. In comparison, multi-functional deep dive will create a higher level of insights prone to higher confidence in decision-making but less timely. (3) A cohesive and aligned decision-making process across a tight number of stakeholders will help consolidate key functional inputs, limit bureaucracy and improve visibility on risks and opportunities. In contrast, opening to ad-hoc members and external contributors will limit blind spots and foster stakeholder trust. Failing to achieve the balance between these aspects of decision-making on a project-specific basis, leads to reduced value creation due to misallocated resources or missed opportunities. It would also impede decision making caused by information silos, slow response time and risk aversion.
How can the pharmaceutical industry leverage AI to address geopolitical challenges and optimize PPM strategies for greater resilience and efficiency?
Getting ahead of disease and improving healthcare imply deep understanding of disease emergence and evolution across countries. Insights may derive from extensive databases searches, connecting to the patient’s narratives and experiences and disease or epidemiology modeling. Value proposition of new alternative would then feed our portfolio decision-making. Assembling large datasets together with internal knowledge on mode of actions through Bayesian networks create insights supporting options for robust actions with lower uncertainty, across several development scenarios. Accessing the right patients and adapting our clinical trials to their needs involves elaborate algorithms in real time. Securing regulatory watch and aiming at filing submissions across several countries simultaneously, rely on generative AI for consolidating sections to the latest available results and adapting to the latest regulation updates without delays. In parallel, implementation of modern supply chain software is securing availability of treatments globally.
What, for you, are the benefits of attending a conference like this and what can attendees expect to learn from your session?
I am curious to learn from my colleagues on how they implement solutions better or tackle difficult issues in a global environment. Portfolio management involves quantitative methods but those are limited in impact without the more influencing aspects of the job, which is easier to convey through these sort of conferences. Most of the aspects of our role involve remote interactions, with less opportunity to directly interact. I am eager to reconnect with some of my colleagues and gather their perspective on what works well in their environment. It also gives the opportunity to identify any topic of growing relevance, outside of my direct scope. I will have the opportunity to describe 4 strategic alternatives in how to articulate project development to Governance and the rationales, in connection to pipeline financial modeling & simulations. I will cover the benefits and difficulties of financially driven decision-making and the reasons for moving away from using only such metrics in isolation of a more holistic approach.
