Archive for the ‘applications’ tag

Back in July, we ran a successful webinar discussing what it takes to create a strategic PMO. The webcast, led by Carl Souchereau, formerly of TransAlta and now Project Director at SNC Lavalin, provided practical advice around mastering the important yet tactical aspects of project management as well as taking strategic responsibility for managing the investment decisions for the portfolio. (If you missed the webcast, it is archived here.)

Because interest in the webinar was so strong, we wanted to extend the conversation and have created the UMT360 Strategic PMO Breakfast Series. We’re fortunate in that Carl has signed on to present his wisdom again, but we’ll also take some time to look at the latest product developments that help the Strategic PMO fulfill the vision Carl will present, including:

• Integrating investment planning and controls across the PPM life-cycle that result in optimized spend and maximized ROI
• Streamlining capital planning and building stronger business cases
• Automating financial tracking and variance analysis to enable dynamic planning
• Establishing a benefits realization framework to measure results

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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 29^th, 2014, focused on the key issues shaping today’s IT investment strategies.

The first poll asked about the factors contributing to an organizations struggles with respect to digital investment models. 37% of respondents believe that agile investment and resource allocation is key to the success of the IT investments. UMT360 believes this is one of most underused drivers of effective IT investments, and our research shows that high-performing organizations are more likely to focus on this area of investment management agility. But this agility isn’t possible without portfolio integration and financial maturity. Without this foundation, organizations will struggle to achieve the dynamic reallocation and optimization of investments.

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Gartner’s recently released 2014 CEO and Senior Executives Survey found that growth and IT are executive’s top priorities and those surveyed are talking about digital.  In Gartner’s announcement of the survey, VP and Gartner Fellow Mark Raskino said the CEO’s who say technology-related change is important to them, must now invest in that insight.  “Make the tough choices. Be prepared to cut back in areas that represent the old pre-digital ways of doing business. But maintain a coherent and integrated view of the investment being made. Don’t allow too much fragmentation across sales, marketing, digital, IT and other budgets to obscure the view and reduce directional control.”

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In Gartner’s recently released 2014 CEO and Senior Executive Survey, a third of the executives surveyed named growth as their top priority.   Businesses want growth but face a series of challenges when it comes to finding ways to paying for it.   Among other things, the run-the-business investments are eroding capacity, consuming funds needed for growth, so the business has to find a way to rationalize the operational spend.  As a result, organizations are taking a hard look at their Application Portfolio Management (APM) to determine what they need to do to make it more effective.

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