UMT360 Blog
Blog Posts from the Leader in Enterprise Portfolio Management
Part 5 in a series on how to extend the value of Microsoft Project Online & Project Server…
By now we know how important good business cases are to ensuring good project and program selection. A business case helps the organization determine the relative value of investments, and are also used to evaluate and prioritize competing initiatives.
But what happens to those business cases once the project has been approved? Read the rest of this entry »
The UMT360 team just returned from the PMO Symposium in South Florida, where we met lots of folks interested in learning about transforming their PMO. Symposium attendees stopping by the UMT360 booth learned about the benefits of establishing a strategic PMO and participated in the UMT360 PMO Maturity Assessment. The assessment survey helps organizations picture themselves on the continuum of establishing a strategic PMO. Literally. Because after taking the survey, each participant placed an old-school Polaroid selfie on the UMT360 booth corresponding to their score, showing how each respondent measured up against their peers. Read the rest of this entry »
You’re probably familiar with the grim statistics. Industry analysts tell us that traditional PPM is failing to deliver the anticipated results. And despite continued and significant investments in PPM, companies are still losing up to 46% of the planned business value from their project portfolios.
Clearly, the status quo isn’t working. But a new breed of business leader is emerging to help buck the trend and transform PPM. And the UMT360 team will be at the PMO Symposium in Miami to help showcase how these leaders are breaking the cycle of unreliable planning, cost overruns and project failures.
If you’re planning on attending the PMO Symposium in Miami from November 16-19, stop by the UMT360 booth to say hello. You can participate in our survey, picture how you measure up against your peers and be in the running for one of the free GoPro cameras we’ll be giving away at the end of each day. Read the rest of this entry »
UMT360’s recent webinar schedule has focused on enabling PMOs to be strategic. Great topics, with some world-class PMO professionals including Learning How to Establish a Strategic PMO with Carl Souchereau from SNC Lavalin T&D, and Changing the PMO Status Quo with Frank La Rocca from ConEd. In fact, we’ve seen so much interest in the Strategic PMO idea that we’ve created a local breakfast series, starting initially in Chicago and Houston.
But we also thought it would be good to step back and define just what makes up a strategic PMO. We reached out to some industry folks to get their views, and one response stood out in particular. Andy Jordan is the president at Roffensian Consulting, and has over 20 years within the portfolio, program, project and PMO space. Andy’s response aligned very closely with our view, and so we thought we’d let Andy share directly! You can reach Andy at andy.jordan@roffensian.com, and we thank him in advance for the guest post! – Paul
By Andy Jordan
In the last few years PMOs have been asked to take on much more ‘business critical’ functions. Some have embraced this opportunity, some have not. The idea of a project focused central services style PMO (people, process, tools, training) is rapidly losing favour because it is not delivering business results. Instead, the idea of a PMO more aligned with the business is gaining traction, and that is what PMOs should always have been. A Strategic PMO is a project centric business department and should be structured and managed in the same way as other business departments – goals and objectives set by enterprise leadership that help the organization as a whole succeed. That’s what we expect for sales, or operations, or fill in the blank other department, and that’s what we should expect of PMOs.
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:
UMT360 are the experts in Enterprise Portfolio Management consulting services and solutions. Our proven methodology provides PMO, IT, business and finance leaders with the critical business planning and controls needed to improve their decision making and transform how they manage enterprise investments. Leveraging our industry leading expertise and technology along with Microsoft’s PPM platform, we help organizations at every level of maturity gain the visibility, insight and enterprise perspective they need to align execution with strategy across all project, program, product, IT asset and capability portfolios. A multi-year winner of Microsoft’s Partner of the Year for PPM, the company has been named a Gartner Cool Vendor in Program and Portfolio Management and is consistently recognized as a Visionary in the Gartner Integrated IT Portfolio Analysis Magic Quadrant.
