financial management

UMT360 Blog

It’s time for the PMO to focus on the big picture

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. We’ve long held that the old ways of managing …

Managing Investments – That’s Your Real Project!

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. …

Just What is a Strategic PMO?

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 …

Key Issues Shaping IT Investment Strategies: Interesting Results from Recent Webcast Polls

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 …

How to Overcome IT Investment Roadblocks

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 …

What is Portfolio Management?

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. I believe firmly that neither definition aptly describes …

The Trifecta of Business Value Erosion

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 …

The PMO of the Future

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 …