UMT360 Blog
Blog Posts from the Leader in Enterprise Portfolio Management
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.
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 answers, Siloed Investment Thinking and Lacking Enterprise Roadmaps, together accounted for more than half of the total number of responses. This tells me that there is still a significant amount of siloed thinking when it comes to planning and implementation.
Ask ten people to define portfolio management and you’ll likely receive ten different answers. Of the various definitions, most will focus on some sort of aggregate reporting across portfolios or highlight alignment of spend with strategic priorities and selecting the optimal project portfolio under varying budget constraints.
Despite significant investments in PPM, it is failing to deliver the anticipated results. Both Gartner and the Standish Group have reported low project success rates and UMT360 research finds that today companies are failing to realize up to 46% of the planned business value from project portfolios.
UMT360’s Chief Product and Marketing Officer Ben Chamberlain refers to the causes of that lost business value as the “Trifecta of Business Value Erosion.” He says there are three main areas of concern.
Once you understand “why” value is being lost, how do you respond to capture the planned business value? One way is for the PMO to view projects as business investments and move toward integrating financial management with PPM so that the business is better able to gauge the economic impact of poor project performance and take corrective action. In a recorded presentation, UMT360’s Ben Chamberlain discusses how UMT360 is helping businesses do that and more. He shows you how to:
In a recent presentation, Gartner Research VP Donna Fitzgerald told a standing room only crowd that PMOs must start change the way they see the landscape and understand that their improvement depends on an ability to deliver value. She explained that 80% of her company’s clients are below level 3 on Gartner’s 5 point maturity scale and that getting to level 3 depends on two things. “One is truly, deeply understanding what value means and the other is everything in the world comes from follow the money…it’s really what ‘s important.”
Her presentation is now available online and includes her rules for measuring both value and financial management capabilities and well as how she sees the PMO of the future and what steps need to be taken today to prepare. Click here to view the presentation “The Most Important PPM Trends for 2014.”
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.
