Brad Hedstrom
Novocain for Fiscal Year R&D Planning
Which is more painful? Fiscal Year R&D planning or a root canal sans anesthetic? Many participants in the Applied Biosystems FY06 R&D plan would take oral surgery over planning.Their FY06 plan was neither operational,or affordable, and resulted in a reduction in force. Vowing not to repeat that torture in FY07, Applied Biosystems set out to find a better solution for resource planning. After evaluating several commercial products for resource and portfolio planning, AB settled on Portfolio DecisionWare. AB had a very short time frame to implement and train on this tool, but within 6 weeks the system was successfully deployed. Despite managing over 500 resources and training 100 users across the company in only two weeks, AB was able to perform their first FY07 roll up on time. The FY06 plan took 2-3 weeks per roll whereas the FY07 plan was rolled up in less than a day. This allowed the plan to be iterated many times prior to executive review. The result was an operational R&D FY07 portfolio that was on budget.
Brad Hedstrom is the director of portfolio and program management for the Molecular Biology Systems division (MBSD) of Life Technologies (formerly Applied Biosystems). Life Technologies (LIFE) is leading global biotechnology tools company. MBSD is the largest division of LIFE with nearly $1.5B annual revenue. Brad and his team of twelve program managers are responsible for both the selection of new product development (NPD) programs via our portfolio management process and the execution of NPD programs via our stage-gate product development process. Brad has been involved in NPD at Life Technologies for over ten years in a variety of R&D leadership roles spanning both functional management and program management. As Chief of Staff to the VP of R&D Brad has also been responsible for annual planning for an R&D organization in excess of 600 resources and an annual budget in excess of $150M. Prior to joining Life Technologies Brad was a principal consulting engineer for five years at Advanced Measurements, a small system integration consulting firm. Brad holds a doctorate in Electrical Engineering from the University of Victoria, Canada and a bachelors in electrical engineering from the University of Wyoming.
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