Bubble Innovator

"Innovator enables Portfolio & Project Mgmt efficiency through ease of use & excellent responsiveness"

Overall: Bubble Innovator is the "single source of truth" for stage gate and portfolio management reporting in our Ortho businesses. It is central to the PMO function and is used for regular monthly reporting of metrics, issue escalation & resolution, and portfolio optimization. Bubble Innovator has provided a level of transparency across the organization that was previously impossible to achieve. There are some key elements of the product that enabled this: highly intuitive user interface allows frequent data upload with minimal effort; visually appealing and simple automated reports drive transparency and alignment across the organization, while streamlining reporting (people can now spend time doing productive work, and less time trying to match an ever-evolving format for reports); and the new addition of highly customized reporting, so that users across many functions (upstream, downstream, pipeline, operations, regulatory, etc) can very easily create the reports that are best suited to their needs, and the questions their leaders are asking - all based on objective data with real-time visibility of updates.

Pros: I already mentioned the simple user interface for data upload, and the equally intuitive customized reporting. Leadership and "supporting" functions for product development get tremendous value from this because they don't need to hunt down answers anymore. Everything from pipeline planning to operational planning can be built on the same foundation of objective data, rather than many different sources interpreted through many different lenses. But the greatest value I think Bubble Innovator delivers is not really the product itself. It's the sense of partnership and responsiveness from the Bubble Innovation team. The Bubble Innovation team becomes a part of your team. They are valued consultants with helpful input on best practices for stage gate management, portfolio analytics, and report visualization. I have continually been impressed with the responsiveness and effort that their team brings to the table. When we have challenges and need to customize our data or analytics or reporting, they are right there beside us, finding the best solution, sharing prototypes in a test environment, and implementing as fast as possible.

Cons: The biggest issue we've had in the past is customized reporting. But this has now been addressed with a new module dedicated to enabling any user to build the report to exactly meet their needs and address the questions being asked by their leaders. There is always room for improvement here, and the leadership demands for alternative views are frequently evolving, but with the customized reporting ability we can deal with this evolution far better than ever before, and beyond the capabilities of any competitive product I've seen. Detailed resource & capacity planning is not the strength of this tool. Compiling and packaging data to drive highly constructive conversations during stage gate reviews, pipeline reviews, and portfolio optimization discussions is. With that said, the Bubble Innovation team rose to the challenge of creating a high-level resource & capacity planning tool that now gives us reasonable ability to plan for forward-looking functional resource gaps in the context of a prioritized Project List. It won't address detailed capabilities/competencies at the individual employee level. For senior level reporting, we tend to speak in PowerPoint. While it is pretty effortless to create Excel and pdf output from Bubble Innovator, it would be nice to be able to export reports/data/charts/content to PowerPoint.