Meet & Greet – Networking Reception

Kick off the experience with early registration and a relaxed networking session over drinks! Connect, catch up with familiar faces, and meet new industry peers.

Chairman's Opening Remarks

Start with Why? Ice-Breaker Session

Meet Your Peers, Share Your Priorities, and Set Your Objectives. A short, structured icebreaker session designed to help delegates connect early, promote networking, share their priorities, and start the conference with more relevant conversations.

From Project to Portfolio: Building and Shaping a Product Pipeline

Pharma R&D is facing diminishing returns: rising costs, crowded targets, declining productivity, and limited incremental clinical value. This keynote explores the strategic shift from projects to portfolios — how value emerges from a balanced pipeline, not individual assets. Sustainable innovation requires portfolio thinking, strategic focus, and disciplined risk management.

Optimize Your Scenarios with Project Data Simulation

In Pharma and Biotech, portfolio decisions must balance innovation, risk, regulatory constraints, and limited resources. This session explores how project data simulation enables leaders to model alternative scenarios, assess trade-offs, and optimize investment decisions with confidence.

The R&D Productivity Challenge

Crossing the valley of clinical death. The R&D funnel, clinical POC, cost of risk resolution, controlling your destiny — tales from Lilly, AstraZeneca, and Pfizer. Gated decision-making — minimizing Type I and Type II errors.

Project Recovery: Getting a Challenging Project Back on Track

When a critical project falls behind schedule and a new project manager takes over, there is often significant pressure to make important decisions with limited information. This case study outlines the key activities and considerations a project manager should focus on to restore the project's progress and ensure successful delivery.

Governance by Design: Securing and Governing AI in Pharma PPM

AI has moved from experimentation to general acceptance in the enterprise, but in the highly regulated pharmaceutical sector, project and portfolio managers require AI that delivers trustworthy and auditable decisions. This presentation unveils the Governance by Design approach of Broadcom's Clarity.

Portfolio Re-Prioritization Under Shifting Constraints: Making the Tough Calls in Public

A candid, cross-functional debate on how portfolio leaders re-sequence work when budget, headcount, or policy shifts hit mid-cycle. Panelists compare real pivots, what criteria they used, how they handled capacity limits, and how they documented defensible decisions for SteerCo.

From Blind Spots to Foresight – How Smart Resource Management Transforms Pharma Portfolio Steering

This session addresses a core challenge in portfolio management: limited insight into whether strategic plans are truly feasible from a resource and skill perspective. Introduces Resource Portfolio Management (RPM) as a two-sided approach that integrates portfolio processes with enabling technology.

Schedule vs. Time: Who Owns the Critical Path?

A frank, cross-functional debate on turning timeline risk into governed reality. Panelists unpack how adaptive trial designs, realistic forecasting, and clear ownership compress timelines without chaos.

Workshop 1: See It to Believe It – 30-Minute Demo of AI-Assisted Project Control

Key principle: Show the human-AI collaboration pattern, not just the tech. What does the PM input? What does AI suggest? Where does the PM decide? Participants are required to bring their laptops.

Workshop 3: Long-Term ROI – Leveraging Portfolio Development and Patent Protection

Types of pharma patents explained as tools, not jargon. How new formulations, dosage forms and indications can provide extended exclusivity. How cross-team collaboration and timing can optimize long-term value.

Workshop 2: The ISO 56007 Paradigm Shift – Addressing the Blind Spot in Project Risk Management

How ISO 56007 redefines uncertainty, advanced project selection frameworks, pre-project analysis excellence, and case studies on how organizations integrate ISO 56007 principles to transform their project governance.

Roundtable 1: Benefits Realization & ROI – Making Value a Pre-Commitment, Not an Epilogue

An interactive roundtable where delegates compare how they define, own, and track benefit KPIs upfront — so every gate and reallocation is tied to outcomes a CFO will recognize.

Roundtable 3: Capacity Is Strategy – Making Resource Reality a Binding Portfolio Constraint

This roundtable reframes capacity as a strategic input to portfolio decision-making and explores lightweight governance practices that make feasibility explicit.

Roundtable 2: Making Change Stick – Embedding Transformation into Pharma PPM

This roundtable explores how to integrate change principles into portfolio and project management practices so that organizational change becomes sustainable and measurable.

Networking Cocktail Reception

Networking Cocktail Reception sponsored by In Parallel.

Chairman's Opening Remarks – Day 2

AI is Not Your Next Step – Get Your House in Order First

PM experts continually refer to AI as an essential "solution" for our profession, yet without defining what AI will solve. This keynote distills the noise down to practical steps essential to deploy AI for PM in a coherent, meaningful way — covering change management, data readiness, and trust.

From AI Hype to Daily Reality – How AI Actually Makes Your PPM Team's Life Easier

This session follows the journey from big promises to everyday practice in PPM for Pharma. Where does AI really help in the life of a PPM team? cplace and Dataciders walk through concrete examples including a pharmaceutical use case where AI already supports teams in reducing time-to-market.

AI in Action: Where Pharma Portfolios Are Really Seeing Results

This panel brings together leaders from pharma, biotech, and CROs to share concrete examples of how AI and digital solutions are impacting portfolio decisions, resource planning, and execution.

One Asset, One Decision? Moving from Individual Ownership to Group Decisions in Pharma

Why group decisions are becoming the norm in pharma, where group decision-making breaks down without structure, and how PMs can enable clarity, pace, and accountability.

Market Trends – Optimizing Post-Trial Access (PTA)

Why the pharmaceutical industry is streamlining PTA processes. Continuing treatment after a clinical trial end is more than just a regulatory obligation — it's a crucial lifeline for patients relying on investigational therapies.

Alliances with Decision Rights: Making Partnerships Move at the Speed of Risk

A perspective-rich debate on how co-development and CDMO partnerships avoid stalls and value leakage. We'll examine the essentials of one-page "treaties", reality-based tech-transfer criteria, and milestone structures that release capital when risk actually burns down.

From Static Portfolios to Real-Time Decision Flows: How the 2AM Scenario Is Redefining Pharmaceutical Portfolio Strategy

From Portfolio Logic to Team Reality: Why PPM Performance Breaks Down at Team Level — and What Leaders Can Do About It

Workshop 2: TeamLIFT – A Team Operating System that Accelerates Team Development

A practical, tools-agnostic workshop to design portfolio governance that passes audits/inspections without slowing delivery. You'll wire traceability from gate decisions to evidence and change control.

Workshop 3: Exploring Portfolio Management Maturity Through Collective Intelligence

Participants assess their current PPM maturity across five dimensions (governance, process, tools, people, culture), identify their biggest gaps, and draft a 90-day improvement roadmap.

Workshop 1: Joining a New Project/Program – First Days, Weeks & Months

Joining a running project/program so as to demonstrate one's value and deliver as quick as possible, requires a careful strategic and tactical plan. This session covers handover & transition, effective onboarding, stakeholder & expectation management, and sustaining momentum.

Roundtable 2: Governance Redesign From the Inside – When Your PMO Needs a Reset

Governance frameworks age out. What worked for a 50-project portfolio breaks at 200. This roundtable brings together PMO leaders who have lived through a governance redesign.

Roundtable 1: Closing Without Ending – Turning Lessons Learned into Monday Morning Change

An interactive roundtable on how teams convert retros into real updates — templates revised, SOPs trimmed, dashboards simplified, and benefits reviews scheduled.

Roundtable 3: Designing High Priority Teams That Can Decide Under Uncertainty

End of the Conference