Rational Focal Point

You need Rational Focal Point when …

• Your product management process needs to be more agile.
• You are looking for decision support to facilitate prioritization and selection of re-quirements.
• Your product or project investments are not based on objective information; decisions are made by ‘the loudest voice in the room’
• You experience difficulties in identifying and valueing product opportunities and to invest in products that meet customer or market demands. No visibility to how products meet market/customer needs
• You tend to underestimate the capacity to execute a project, resulting in products ar-riving late to market that miss the window of opportunity
• You experience rapid portfolio growth coupled with the inability to manage scope and features
• Your innovative ideas arrive too late to market resulting in missed revenue opportuni-ties.
• You wish to allocate limited budgets wisely to support most value initiatives
• You find it difficult to determine if or when a project should be terminated to pursue new, more valuable opportunities

Features – What does it do?

• Competitive and win/loss analysis – understand the strengths and weaknesses of com-peting products within the context of wins & losses, alongside other competitive intel-ligence.
• Requirements management -  Capture and communicate enhancement requests, product ideas, market needs, technical needs for product development
• Value-based selection– select the requirements most valued by the market capable of returning value to your business for product development.
• Release planning – Focus product releases on key capabilities within the constraints of resource availability
• Product roadmap planning
• Assessment of product request against business priorities, and road mapping.

Benefits – Why would I use it? 

• Reduce risk and improve cost estimations of investments by modeling financial and market impacts and by performing scenario, statistical and financial analysis
• Reduce costs of implementations by utilizing pre-defined configurations based on best practices
• Integrate enterprise architecture plans and project execution into portfolio management to ensure enterprise and project-level decisions are aligned with financial and market needs
• Bridge the gap between the business and engineering by centralizing information that is key to decision-making, status reporting and portfolio reviews
• Overcome the influence of the loudest voice in the room and use objective information to support decision making.
• Centralize and collaborate on information to escape the chaos of managing data in emails, documents, and spreadsheets, speeding the ability to respond to changing mar-ket and business conditions