We’re excited to be participating in the Gartner PPM & IT Governance Summit once again this year. The Summit will will be in Orlando from June 6-8. If you plan on attending, please do stop by the UMT360 booth and say hello.
UMT360 Blog
Blog Posts from the Leader in Enterprise Portfolio Management
We’re excited to be participating in the Gartner PPM & IT Governance Summit once again this year. The Summit will will be in Orlando from June 6-8. If you plan on attending, please do stop by the UMT360 booth and say hello.
No, the UMT360 team didn’t come up with the theme for this year’s Gartner PPM & IT Governance Summit. But we certainly could have. Because from our perspective, the event’s theme — Thriving on Digital Chaos: Innovation, Agility and Collaboration — sounds exactly like what we’ve been telling our clients for years now. Read the rest of this entry »
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.
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.
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 key issues shaping today’s IT investment strategies.
The first poll asked about the factors contributing to an organizations strug
gles 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.
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 the leap to becoming a strategic PMO office by focusing efforts on gaining control of their investments. Annual planning and traditional resource allocation is not enough, as it cannot accommodate the challenges of market complexity and rapid change. Portfolio rebalancing allows organizations to keep their investment priorities in check and optimize the resource allocation and consumption.
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.”
Businesses today are challenged with ways to fund innovation as budgets remain flat or increase incrementally. The inability to efficiently invest in the future is one of the reason’s IT is becoming less relevant. It’s imperative that organizations make changes and not only gain a greater understanding of their spending dynamics but also adopt a new approach to decision making, one that focuses on strategic investments and their ability to create competitive advantage. How do you get started?
Built on SharePoint, UMT360 is the only Enterprise Portfolio Management solution offering seamless integration with Project Server. Our customers who also use Project Server have found that UMT360 is helping them get more from their PPM.
“We wanted one source of information; we wanted a common language; we wanted to be global; and we wanted to integrate and align our business better.” -Sudanese Spence, IT Director, Global Portfolio Management Office, AGCO
“UMT360 brings greater financial clarity to Microsoft Project Server that’s not out of the box.” -Rob Morrison, IT Project Manager, ConocoPhillips
“UMT360 has consistently produced innovative products that help organizations transform their business and gain even more value from their Microsoft platform investment. UMT360 helps Microsoft customers gain financial transparency across their project, program and asset portfolios and collaborate to improve investment decisions.” -Ludovic Hauduc, Director of Development, Microsoft Project Server
Cick here to learn more about how UMT360 helps companies get more ROI from their Project and Portfolio Management investment – Financial Intelligence, Application Portfolios and IT Business Management. UMT360’s Chief Product and Marketing Officer Ben Chamberlain recently discussed how UMT360 is helping businesses establish a benefits realization framework to effectively track the actual value delivered across the investment portfolio, drive accountability and encourage realistic estimates. Click here to see the solution in action.
In March, UMT360’s Chief Product and Marketing Officer Ben Chamberlain presented a webinar showing Project Server customers how UMT360 can help them gain complete financial intelligence across their project portfolios and increase ROI. Ben discussed how UMT360 helps eliminate the need for Excel and standardizes investment governance controls across the PPM lifecycle, streamlines capital planning, and helps build stronger business cases and a benefits realization framework. Click here to view this complimentary webinar for Microsoft Project Server customers. UMT360 is built on the SharePoint platform and is the only enterprise portfolio management solution to provide seamless integration with Project Server.
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.
