Overall description of Flightmap

Flightmap is intended for Innovation Portfolio Management. It has functionality to gather, analyse, validate, track and store information for easy monitoring and better decision-making on innovation projects and portfolios. Typical users of Flightmap are management board members, managers of R&D, marketing, strategy and new business as well as project leaders of innovation projects.


Functionality of Flightmap

  • Project input

With Flightmap, users enter project inputs for each project (or project proposal). This input consists of project properties, project planning (timing, staffing, costs), risks, and benefits (which markets are addressed and how). The status of this data is guarded by linking access to certain roles and by tracking changes. New versions of a project can be created over time to capture new insights, and actuals can be booked on each project to monitor its progress. Documents can be uploaded to Flightmap to support the project inputs.


  • Business Modelling

Flightmap offers a variety of options to model the business aspects of a project. Projects can be configured as partner projects (where costs, resourcing, as well as revenues are shared with external partners). It also has built-in support for revenues from (initial) new product sales as well as recurring revenues from in installed base. In its configuration options, it also allows a mix of external and internal funding. Varying these parameters provides a powerful tool to explore the best project approach from a business perspective.


  • Project Analysis

For each project a full set of financial analyses can be run, including the financial forecasts over time (of the business case). Per project, a number of key performance indicators (KPI-s) are available, based on (a combination of) their plan and actuals. These KPI-s include NPV, strategic score, total cost, resourcing, and status indicators for project status, data quality, project progress, and risk. A sensitivity analysis on the NPV helps identify improvement areas for the project.


  • Portfolio Analysis

By grouping project in classes, the total set of projects can be split across sub portfolios. In fact, a portfolio in Flightmap can be any set of projects, where some portfolios are automatic (e.g. the portfolio of all projects, or all projects in a certain class), and some are manual. Each portfolio can be charted for its total financial and resource impact. This way, future revenues, profits, costs, cash flows (and their components) are visible in real-time. By combining projects into a number of alternative portfolios, these scenarios can be compared interactively, to determine the optimal portfolio. By offering a build-in strategic scoring mechanism, the specific strategic value of each project is an integral part of this analysis.

Each portfolio can be visualized in an X-Y bubble plot, a funnel chart, resource demands, or any financial parameter (from revenue to cash flow). A tabular overview of all projects and their KPIs is also available. The balance of a portfolio (in terms of value, cost, resourcing) can be verified with the balance chart, showing how much each project (or project group) can be.


  • Funnel Management

Monitoring the progress of the innovation portfolio is supported by showing the timing of project stages in a roadmap chart, and by showing progress through stages in a funnel. The funnel can be configured to depict desired and actual risk reduction over time, as well as level of outside involvement (the open innovation funnel). In a special version of the bubble plot, all versions of a single project can be compared to see how a project is developing over time.


  • Rights and Workflow

Flightmap supports multiple user roles:

    • Project leader: enters, updates, and owns project data, and analyses own project.
    • Portfolio manager: owns (part of) the portfolio, analyses alternatives, and captures the decision (by approving projects).
    • Analyst: checks project data by means of project and portfolio analysis, can set status accordingly and create and manage alerts.

Flow of actions identified in Flightmap is by means of the alert mechanism, with which remarks and actions to be resolved can be inserted for a project.

Administrator users can assign these roles, set default values, and configure the portal’s admin settings. Custom model configurations (such as market models) can be uploaded to Flightmap by the administrator as well, and bulk imports (from other applications) are available. Each user can manage their own account settings (such as their password).


  • Market Management

By defining market developments (market size, customer value and profitability) in a separate input structure, Flightmap allows separation of ownership for market intelligence and project data. Multiple projects targeting the same market automatically use the same market assumptions, thus allowing comparison. Market developments can be entered manually by analyst users, or can be included through a dedicated market logic model.