This comic book was created for SmartOrg, Inc. by intern Puneet Sharma in 2015. It captures product sales conversations that go south due to the IT question from hell, "Why can't we build this in-house?"

1. Art by:
Puneet Sharma

2. FANTAS CORP, A SUCCESSFUL
FORTUNE 500 COMPANY, HAS A
POPULAR PRODUCT IN THE MARKET
Increased competition and
internal complexity has
been weighing them
down.
Michelle Lucas, Head of R&D, is
struggling to organize the
company’s innovative efforts.
R&D projects are funded
based on the political power
of their champions.

3. Michelle attends “Managing the R&D portfolio” by David Matheson.
R&D portfolio
management is quite
different from operational
portfolio management.
First, there is not
really any data
about the future in
R&D portfolios.
Second, your decision
is about which good
projects you’re going to
kill so you can focus on
the great ones.
Porfolio Decision
Analysis provides a
learning framework
to help separate the
great projects from
the good ones.
By embedding portfolio decision
analysis into your work process, you
can get the entire R&D organization
to engage with the right questions.

4. Let’s chat.
SmartOrg
can help.
John, can we really
do this in-house?
At what cost?
They’re making
a big mistake...
This is
intriguing. How
do we do this?
let’s not get another vendor in when
we already have a solid IT team in house.
I think SmartOrg provides a
great competency in portfolio
decision analysis. What do you
think of their proposal?
That sounds
like $300K. Let’s
do it first
in-house and
see how it goes.
Barry Saunders, CEO
John Meyers, IT Manager
Just give me Six
months and the
funding for three
developers.

5. There’s a different
between theoretical
understanding and
actual experience.
Six months later . . .
Uh, this is getting more complex than
we thought. Michelle’s team can’t
quite tell us what they need.
We should’ve trusted Michelle’s
intuition. Let’s start talking to
SmartOrg and meet again.
I’m concerned about the
quantitative focus. We value the
rich conversations we have here.
Let’s do
a basic workshop
so we understand
how this process
works.
Yes, I don’t
want to
lose that.
So where do
we stand?
We can’t because, as
I said six months ago,
we don’t have this
competency.
Barry Saunders,
CEO

6. In a SmartOrg workshop
I didn’t realize that SmartOrg’s
quantitative approach is
actually designed to support
rich conversations!
Yes, and their
system is
designed to
make these
conversations
happen in real
time over
grounded
information.
Why haven’t I
seen anything
like this before?
You need to bring together both
software development and a decision
analysis background to pull this off.
We have both at SmartOrg.
It’s amazing how
much high-quality
information can
be generated
from internal
staff just by
asking the right
questions!
Tim, FP&A executive

7. You’re basically showing us what
strategic business planning ought
to be about. I think we need to
adopt this organization-wide.
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registered trademarks of their respective companies. 2015-08-19