Rethinking Project Prioritization with What-If Analysis

Project prioritization is at the core of portfolio management in most pharma organizations. Many teams follow a familiar playbook: rank the projects by NPV, ROI, or some other metric... then select from the top until the budget is used up. Easy peasy, right?

Well, not always!

🚫 Some of those top projects might be high risk, with a profile the company isn’t comfortable with

🔄 Others further down the list may be mid-trial, and hard to drop without operational or ethical implications

📉 And picking from the top doesn’t always lead to the best portfolio outcome — it could very well be suboptimal

This is where portfolio what-if analysis comes in.

In Captario SUM, we support what-if analysis by simulating future investment decisions based on real-world options. The approach is simple to use but powerful in its insight.

🧩 We start with our current portfolio, including ongoing trials and projects with upcoming decisions

📊 You can explore this base case with any key metric: cost, value, risk, launches, revenue

🎯 Using filters, we test strategies by toggling go/no-go outcomes at decision points

🔁 These can include Phase 2 start, Phase 3 start, registration, or any decision point really

💡 Instead of simply excluding or including entire projects, we simulate decisions at the actual strategic inflection points

The beauty of this is that simulation unlocks a much more realistic view of the portfolio. If a project has multiple gates ahead, we can ask: What happens if we stop at Phase 3? What if we succeed and launch early? How does that affect the overall portfolio risk, cost, or timing?

This adds depth and nuance to portfolio strategy.

And yes — all of this is modeled with uncertainty baked in. So you don’t just get an average outcome. You get a landscape of possibilities as shown in the picture.

I am very curious to hear how others are tackling this. How do you do what-if analysis for your portfolio? Let me know in the comments!