UMT360 Blog

Blog Posts from the Leader in Strategic Portfolio Management

Navigating the Murky Waters of Portfolio Management: Insights and Perspectives

In a world where PMOs are constantly bombarded with mediocre methods and approaches from many consulting and software companies, transparency is a rare and valuable commodity. As someone who played a key role in inventing the field of project portfolio management, I feel it’s my responsibility to offer some much-needed visibility into what’s really happening ...

Portfolio Management Secrets: The Key to Business Success Lies in Understanding How Decision Objects Rule the Game!”

Portfolio management is a complex and multifaceted process that involves various activities, such as selecting investments, monitoring their performance, and making decisions. If you want to succeed at managing a portfolio, you need to understand the decision objects involved. There are four primary internal decision objects in portfolio management, namely the business, investments, funds, and ...

Understanding Domains and Their Role in Portfolio Management

In our guide on the elements of portfolio management, we explore the complexities of portfolio management and highlighted the importance of understanding the interconnectivity and influence of different components of the portfolio management process. Those components include decision objects, decision domains, decision menu, time, structure, humans, and rules. This blog post delves deeper into the ...

Mastering Portfolio Management: Understanding the 7 Interdependent Elements

This blog highlights the importance of 7 elements and their impact on portfolio management. By taking a holistic approach, organizations can optimize their investment strategies and avoid failures. Portfolio management is a complex process that involves selecting investments, monitoring their performance, and making decisions. To ensure that an organization performs well, seven elements need to ...

Mastering Enterprise Portfolio Management Under Uncertainty: Strategies for Overcoming the 7 Key Challenges and Making Better Decisions

How organizations can overcome uncertainty by adopting an unsatisfied mindset, hedging strategies, and shifting to variable costs while recognizing the value of acquiring better information for accurate decision-making. Are you tired of feeling powerless in the face of uncertainty? Do you wish you could take control and make the most of the opportunities? If so, ...

UMT360 Strategic Portfolio Management Software positioned in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™

For the third straight year, UMT360 software is included in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Strategic Portfolio Management report. It’s just one more data point in the continuation of the growth and acceptance that UMT360’s solutions are seeing across the industry. “From record sales growth, to continued strong adoption of our software and services, to integrations with ...

Managing Portfolio Risk: The Importance of Thinking Like an Economist –
Elements of Portfolio Management Decisions Under Uncertainty

Portfolio management is a complex task that requires multiple personas, including an economist, a behavioral scientist, an enterprise architect, and a financial analyst. Each of these personas requires different ways of thinking about and analyzing data, as well as consideration of the multiple factors that may impact the portfolio’s performance. However, one thing that remains ...

Unlocking the Secrets of Business Transformation: Why Projects are Failing and How to Improve Outcomes

Organizations have been investing heavily in business transformation projects in the hope of improving operations, increasing efficiency, and driving success. But the current trend suggests that these projects are failing at an alarming rate, with the benefits realization success rate often below 15%. This raises a series of provocative questions about why these initiatives are ...

Why Settling for Mediocrity in Strategic Portfolio Management is a Recipe for Disaster

Mediocrity in Strategic Portfolio Management(SPM) is a ticking time bomb that is threatening the success of organizations everywhere. The cost of failure is staggering, with recent studies showing that up to 70 to 90% of business transformation projects fail[i] due to poor portfolio management. This equates to billions of dollars wasted on subpar results, drained ...

The Future is Here: How AI and ML are Revolutionizing Project Portfolio Management

Strategic portfolio management (SPM) is the process of making decisions about the selection and allocation of resources to achieve an organization’s strategies.  This involves balancing the organization’s investments to maximize their potential benefits, while considering cost, capacity and risk limitations. In SPM, decisions have to take into account the organization’s immediate, medium and long-term goals. ...

The New Building Blocks: Core Competencies

With the collapse of Taylorism, which focused on task and process improvement, the natural inclination is to look for another structure to replace it. Unfortunately, there is no universal answer. Organizations must realize that they require a new paradigm that allows them to optimize across many divisions in parallel. Project Portfolio management (PPM) theory is ...

The Magic Formula Of Uncertainty

Five connected underlying structures, leading to uncertainty In times of great uncertainty, many organizations drop their long-time strategy and discipline, freeze their investments, and wait for a return to normal. That’s ineffective because it focuses on the what’s happening, and not what’s causing it to happen.  Too often, in too many organizations, strategic planning and ...

A Formula For Investment Success – Customize Your Investment Journey

Not all investment types are created equal, so they can’t be treated as if they were.  However, organizations are often uncertain of the need to customize their investment process, and as a result, they don’t appreciate the benefits of a robust portfolio management approach. That’s a mistake, for two main reasons.  Firstly, portfolio management is ...

Why The Portfolio Management System Stalled

Recently, companies have shifted their attention to business transformation or optimization in order to improve their current operations and extend their opportunities. This is a significant shift, moving towards a future focus instead of attempting to get the most out of the present through disciplines like process and task optimization or reengineering. This is a ...

360 Enterprise Connect v3.9

We’re pleased to announce the availability of 360 Enterprise Connect v3.9. We strongly recommend that you validate these updates once they become available. Here is a list of changes that will be introduced with this update: Repository Imports & Connectors Modeling Other Programmability Visit the UMT360 Product Version History page for version details.

360 Portfolio Insights v6.11 – Product Update 11

We’re pleased to announce the availability of 360 Portfolio Insights v6.11 – Product Update 11 (PU11). Product Updates include all previously released public updates and private hotfixes. We strongly recommend that any patch and release is validated in a non-production environment first before being applied to production environments. Here is a list of changes that ...

360 Enterprise Connect v3.8

We’re pleased to announce the availability of 360 Enterprise Connect v3.8. We strongly recommend that you validate these updates once they become available. Here is a list of changes that will be introduced with this update: Repository Import and Connectors Modeling Assessments & Surveys Other Programmability Visit the UMT360 Product Version History page for version ...

360 Portfolio Insights v6.10 – Product Update 10

We’re pleased to announce the availability of 360 Portfolio Insights v6.10 – Product Update 10 (PU10). Product Updates include all previously released public updates and private hotfixes. We strongly recommend that any patch and release is validated in a non-production environment first before being applied to production environments. Here is a list of changes that ...

From the Ancient Pyramids to Behavioral Mastery: Tracing the Metamorphosis of Project Portfolio Management

Investment has always been a driving force behind humanity’s biggest achievements, from conquering new lands to building thriving empires. Consider Christopher Columbus, who sought investment from all corners of Europe in his quest to find new trade routes to Asia. Despite being rejected by most investors, he eventually secured funding from the Spanish crown and ...

360 Portfolio Insights v6.9 – Product Update 9

We’re pleased to announce the availability of 360 Portfolio Insights v6.9 – Product Update 9 (PU9). Product Updates include all previously released public updates and private hotfixes. We strongly recommend that any patch and release is validated in a non-production environment first before being applied to production environments. UPCOMING CHANGES: Starting with v6.9, ‘SharePoint Connected ...

360 Enterprise Connect v3.7

We’re pleased to announce the availability of 360 Enterprise Connect v3.7. We strongly recommend that you validate these updates once they become available. Here is a list of changes that have been introduced with this update: Visit the UMT360 Product Version History page for version details.