UMT360 Blog
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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 …
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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 …
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In the previous blog post titled Mastering Portfolio Management: Understanding the 7 Interdependent Elements, we explored 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 …
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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 …
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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, …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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. …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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Enterprise investment management is still waiting for the fundamental tenets to be established. In McKinsey’s recent global survey, 31% of their business transformation were successful. At the same time, successful organizations have realized only 67% of the potential financial benefits their transformations could have achieved. Moreover, nearly 80% of the loss occurs in the investment …
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Transformation has always been a subject of fascination for business leaders. The interest in business reengineering and business transformation really went into overdrive in the 1980s. And the current focus on the digital transformation trend is merely the latest in this continuing saga. To be clear, business transformation represents management ambitions and strategy. But it …
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With over 30 years of deploying investment management strategy software and consulting, I have come to realize that organizations require different approaches to support the implementation of their business strategy. Investment strategy is typically viewed as a vehicle to implement business strategy. For as long as I can remember, the assumption has been that strategy …
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We met a lot of folks at the Microsoft Ignite Conference in Chicago last week. And while everyone we spoke with had unique and specific challenges, one common thread ran through our conversations. Most organizations we spoke with used Microsoft Project Online or Project Server as their PPM tool, yet still wanted a more efficient and effective way to manage their projects. …
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A recent UMT360 webinar attracted about 200 project management professionals interested in learning more about how today’s PMO can bridge the planning and execution gap. Judging from the responses to our poll questions during the presentation, nobody doubts that there is a gap. But it’s clear that many organizations are not quite sure what may …
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We asked the audience attending a recent UMT360 webinar – comprised mostly of Enterprise Architects (EAs) – a few questions. I learn the most when I hear directly from the professionals in our industry, so I thought I’d share a few of the results that I found particularly illuminating. “There is one prerequisite for managing …
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I am an avid proponent of the transformative effects of technology. Indeed, digitalizing traditional PPM is core to our mission of helping organizations bridge the gap between strategy and execution. That’s why the recent Q&A with Gartner “Thriving on Digital Chaos” caught my attention. It’s an interesting read, one that touches on the disruptive impact …
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(Final post of a series on the forces helping to drive a tactical to strategic transformation of the PMO.) In this series of blog posts, we’ve established the importance of focusing on capabilities, prioritization, allocation and road maps as they relate to the Strategic PMO. But at the end of the day, all of those …
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(Part five of a series on the forces helping to drive a tactical to strategic transformation of the PMO.) Effective planning and execution of strategic initiatives requires that processes, technology and implementation all be synchronized with company strategy. Organizations that ignore these dependencies risk not being able to implement even moderately complex programs. Project Gantt …
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(Part four of a series on the forces helping to drive a tactical to strategic transformation of the PMO.) For many companies, the allocation of resources is driven from the bottom up. Allocation decisions are often disconnected from business capabilities, are commonly based only on one year of data, or are guided by a simple …
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(Part three of a series on the forces helping to drive a tactical to strategic transformation of the PMO.) A recent Gartner report provides some interesting perspective on the impact that prioritization has on today’s enterprise. Gartner reports that a majority of CIOs agree that non-prioritized, competing projects and programs are an obstacle to implementing …
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(Part two of a series on the forces helping to drive a tactical to strategic transformation of the PMO.) To be truly successful, every organization must have a well-articulated strategy. And it’s crucial that this strategy be tightly aligned with an execution plan. But for many, there’s still a significant gap between strategy and execution. …
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(Part one of a series on the forces helping to drive a tactical to strategic transformation of the PMO.) For decades now, the PMO has been typically focused on tactical execution. Which is what made the keynote address at this year’s PMO Symposium – by one of the world’s foremost authorities on competitive advantage – …
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Enterprises have invested billions of dollars implementing PPM solutions under the promise that they would increase project effectiveness and efficiency. But have those solutions delivered on their promises? Unfortunately, the answer is no. Traditional PPM is simply failing to deliver the anticipated results. There are many reasons, but at a fundamental level, PPM is notorious …
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As the enterprise performance crisis pushes IT investments back to the top of IT leadership concerns, we ran three surveys aimed at understanding where the market is at with respect to IT investment strategies. The questions, asked during the live webinar, Why Integrated IT Portfolio Management Matters, conducted on July 29th, 2014, focused on the …
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During a recent UMT360 webinar covering How to Become a Strategic PMO (see archive here), we found that only 1% have regular dynamic reallocation reviews via automated processes. Another 39% have regular reviews, but require manual, time-intensive efforts to collect and standardize data. UMT360’s message to PPM practitioners is that this is their opportunity to take …
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Many of today’s processes and methods for managing technology investments were not designed for networked organizations operating at high speeds. Financial management best practices were not created for programs, portfolios and assets. In a recent webinar, we polled attendees and asked them about which factors are most important in overcoming IT investment management roadblocks. The top top …
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Today enterprises waste more money on IT than ever before and it’s not as if the money is going into growing and transforming the business. What, then, is pushing costs into these stratospheric levels? Most of the money, an average 66% according to Gartner, goes into keeping the lights on and more than 6% is wasted …
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Having just returned from Gartner’s PPM & IT Governance Summit in Maryland, I’ve been reflecting on the many great discussions our team had regarding Digitized IT and UMT360’s approach to Enterprise Portfolio Management (EPM). Because we have long promoted the tenets of integration, transparency and digitalization as key to successful business investment management, it’s rewarding …
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IT and the business knows: The year-to-year viability of a company depends on its ability to innovate. We have learned over the years that innovation comes from three sources. Top Down – Driven by management imperatives (i.e. we have to be in the cloud) Bottom Up – Can originate anywhere in the organization, everyone participates and …
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I was reading a blog from a while back on the HBR Blog Network called “The Four Personas of the Next-Generation CIO.” It was amazing to stop and think about how much has changed since the blog was written a few years ago. While the issues for the CIO remain basically the same as in the …
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IT investments face a leaner, slimmer future but the companies that master IT investment cost optimization will emerge with better ROI on their investments. IT investments are positioned as so essential to core operations and integral to business success that they often remain remarkably resistant to cutbacks, even in economic downturns. Although IT investment budgets …
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IT spending is back up. Gartner reports the average IT spending increased by 4% in 2012 and is expected to increase by another 3.1% this year (Gartner Market Databook 4Q13 Update) reaching $3.8 trillion. The revival in IT spending suggests that progress is proceeding quickly so it may come as a surprise that many believe …
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As we ring in 2014, IT spending is on its way up. Gartner is forecasting a 3.1% increase in worldwide IT spending this year taking it to an estimated $3.8 trillion. Also on the rise, the amount of software budgets dedicated to applications. In a Gartner enterprise IT spending study last year, respondents indicated the …
