Mike Gruia

UMT360 Blog

Portfolio Management Secrets: The Key to Business Success Lies in Understanding How Decision Objects Rule the Game!”

Mike Gruia, Co-founder

Updated July 20, 2023

Portfolio management is a complex and multifaceted process that involves various activities, such as selecting investments, monitoring their performance, and making decisions. If you want to succeed at managing a portfolio, you need to understand the decision objects involved. There are four primary internal decision objects in portfolio management, namely the business, investments, funds, and ...

Understanding Domains and Their Role in Portfolio Management

Mike Gruia, Co-founder

Updated July 20, 2023

In our guide on the elements of portfolio management, we explore the complexities of portfolio management and highlighted the importance of understanding the interconnectivity and influence of different components of the portfolio management process. Those components include decision objects, decision domains, decision menu, time, structure, humans, and rules. This blog post delves deeper into the ...

Mastering Portfolio Management: Understanding the 7 Interdependent Elements

Mike Gruia, Co-founder

Updated July 20, 2023

This blog highlights the importance of 7 elements and their impact on portfolio management. By taking a holistic approach, organizations can optimize their investment strategies and avoid failures. Portfolio management is a complex process that involves selecting investments, monitoring their performance, and making decisions. To ensure that an organization performs well, seven elements need to ...

Mastering Enterprise Portfolio Management Under Uncertainty: Strategies for Overcoming the 7 Key Challenges and Making Better Decisions

Mike Gruia, Co-founder

Updated June 22, 2023

How organizations can overcome uncertainty by adopting an unsatisfied mindset, hedging strategies, and shifting to variable costs while recognizing the value of acquiring better information for accurate decision-making. Are you tired of feeling powerless in the face of uncertainty? Do you wish you could take control and make the most of the opportunities? If so, ...

Managing Portfolio Risk: The Importance of Thinking Like an Economist –
Elements of Portfolio Management Decisions Under Uncertainty

Mike Gruia, Co-founder

Updated July 20, 2023

Portfolio management is a complex task that requires multiple personas, including an economist, a behavioral scientist, an enterprise architect, and a financial analyst. Each of these personas requires different ways of thinking about and analyzing data, as well as consideration of the multiple factors that may impact the portfolio’s performance. However, one thing that remains ...

Unlocking the Secrets of Business Transformation: Why Projects are Failing and How to Improve Outcomes

Mike Gruia, Co-founder

Updated June 22, 2023

Organizations have been investing heavily in business transformation projects in the hope of improving operations, increasing efficiency, and driving success. But the current trend suggests that these projects are failing at an alarming rate, with the benefits realization success rate often below 15%. This raises a series of provocative questions about why these initiatives are ...

Why Settling for Mediocrity in Strategic Portfolio Management is a Recipe for Disaster

Mike Gruia, Co-founder

Updated June 22, 2023

Mediocrity in Strategic Portfolio Management(SPM) is a ticking time bomb that is threatening the success of organizations everywhere. The cost of failure is staggering, with recent studies showing that up to 70 to 90% of business transformation projects fail[i] due to poor portfolio management. This equates to billions of dollars wasted on subpar results, drained ...

Why The Portfolio Management System Stalled

Mike Gruia, Co-founder

Updated June 22, 2023

Recently, companies have shifted their attention to business transformation or optimization in order to improve their current operations and extend their opportunities. This is a significant shift, moving towards a future focus instead of attempting to get the most out of the present through disciplines like process and task optimization or reengineering. This is a ...

The Enterprise’s Biggest Challenge – Bridging the Planning & Execution Gap

Mike Gruia, Co-founder

Updated June 22, 2023

A recent UMT360 webinar attracted about 200 project management professionals interested in learning more about how today’s PMO can bridge the planning and execution gap. Judging from the responses to our poll questions during the presentation, nobody doubts that there is a gap. But it’s clear that many organizations are not quite sure what may ...

Enterprise Architects: Mastering Digital Investment Management

Mike Gruia, Co-founder

Updated June 22, 2023

We asked the audience attending a recent UMT360 webinar – comprised mostly of Enterprise Architects (EAs) – a few questions. I learn the most when I hear directly from the professionals in our industry, so I thought I’d share a few of the results that I found particularly illuminating. “There is one prerequisite for managing ...

Digitalization And The Changing Role Of PPM

Mike Gruia, Co-founder

Updated June 22, 2023

I am an avid proponent of the transformative effects of technology. Indeed, digitalizing traditional PPM is core to our mission of helping organizations bridge the gap between strategy and execution. That’s why the recent Q&A with Gartner “Thriving on Digital Chaos” caught my attention. It’s an interesting read, one that touches on the disruptive impact ...

To Deliver Effectively You Must Be Able To Measure, Understand, Predict, Realign and Reallocate

Mike Gruia, Co-founder

Updated June 22, 2023

(Final post of a series on the forces helping to drive a tactical to strategic transformation of the PMO.) In this series of blog posts, we’ve established the importance of focusing on capabilities, prioritization, allocation and road maps as they relate to the Strategic PMO. But at the end of the day, all of those ...

Mapping the Road from Investments to Value Realization

Mike Gruia, Co-founder

Updated July 7, 2023

(Part five of a series on the forces helping to drive a tactical to strategic transformation of the PMO.) Effective planning and execution of strategic initiatives requires that processes, technology and implementation all be synchronized with company strategy. Organizations that ignore these dependencies risk not being able to implement even moderately complex programs. Project Gantt ...

Linking Resource Allocation To Strategy

Mike Gruia, Co-founder

Updated June 26, 2023

(Part four of a series on the forces helping to drive a tactical to strategic transformation of the PMO.) For many companies, the allocation of resources is driven from the bottom up. Allocation decisions are often disconnected from business capabilities, are commonly based only on one year of data, or are guided by a simple ...

Prioritization – Making The Right Tradeoffs

Mike Gruia, Co-founder

Updated June 22, 2023

(Part three of a series on the forces helping to drive a tactical to strategic transformation of the PMO.) A recent Gartner report provides some interesting perspective on the impact that prioritization has on today’s enterprise. Gartner reports that a majority of CIOs agree that non-prioritized, competing projects and programs are an obstacle to implementing ...

Connecting Strategy to Execution

Mike Gruia, Co-founder

Updated June 22, 2023

(Part two of a series on the forces helping to drive a tactical to strategic transformation of the PMO.) To be truly successful, every organization must have a well-articulated strategy. And it’s crucial that this strategy be tightly aligned with an execution plan. But for many, there’s still a significant gap between strategy and execution. ...

Evolving From Tactical To Strategic PMO

Mike Gruia, Co-founder

Updated July 20, 2023

(Part one of a series on the forces helping to drive a tactical to strategic transformation of the PMO.) For decades now, the PMO has been typically focused on tactical execution. Which is what made the keynote address at this year’s PMO Symposium – by one of the world’s foremost authorities on competitive advantage – ...

How to Overcome IT Investment Roadblocks

Mike Gruia, Co-founder

Updated July 19, 2023

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 ...

Stop Wasting Your IT Spend

Mike Gruia, Co-founder

Updated June 22, 2023

Today enterprises waste more money on IT than ever before and it’s not as if the money is going into growing and transforming the business. What, then, is pushing costs into these stratospheric levels? Most of the money, an average 66% according to Gartner, goes into keeping the lights on and more than 6% is wasted ...

Digitalized IT Maturity Evaluated at Gartner PPM & IT Governance Summit

Mike Gruia, Co-founder

Updated June 22, 2023

Having just returned from Gartner’s PPM & IT Governance Summit in Maryland, I’ve been reflecting on the many great discussions our team had regarding Digitized IT and UMT360’s approach to Enterprise Portfolio Management (EPM). Because we have long promoted the tenets of integration, transparency and digitalization as key to successful business investment management, it’s rewarding ...

Strike & Maintain the Right Innovation Balance

Mike Gruia, Co-founder

Updated June 22, 2023

IT and the business knows: The year-to-year viability of a company depends on its ability to innovate. We have learned over the years that innovation comes from three sources. Top Down – Driven by management imperatives (i.e. we have to be in the cloud) Bottom Up – Can originate anywhere in the organization, everyone participates and ...

UMT360 Announces the Release of UMT360 Portfolios

Ben Chamberlain

Updated June 22, 2023

UMT360 today announced the release of the newest module in its leading Enterprise Portfolio Management solution – UMT360 Portfolios. UMT360 Portfolios connects siloed portfolios (e.g. project, application, IT Service and business capability) to build a dynamic blueprint of a company’s operating fabric. It provides three breakthrough EPM models to help CIOs, Portfolio Managers and PMOs visualize ...

Key Digital Models for CIO Management of Applications Investments

Ben Chamberlain

Updated July 19, 2023

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 ...

The CIO as Chief Investment Officer

Mike Gruia, Co-founder

Updated June 22, 2023

I was reading a blog from a while back on the HBR Blog Network called “The Four Personas of the Next-Generation CIO.” It was amazing to stop and think about how much has changed since the blog was written a few years ago. While the issues for the CIO remain basically the same as in the ...

Debunking the Growth Capacity Gap

Ben Chamberlain

Updated June 22, 2023

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, ...

Three Steps Toward Benefits Realization

Ben Chamberlain

Updated July 7, 2023

Research shows us that businesses rarely get full benefits from their investments. It’s largely why Benefits Realization is such a hot topic today. Defined by Gartner as the discipline organizations adopt to maximize the business value of projects and investments, Benefits Realization software allows senior management to see how specific investments align with the business so they’re better able ...

5 Principles Essential to IT Cost Optimization

Mike Gruia, Co-founder

Updated June 22, 2023

IT investments face a leaner, slimmer future but the companies that master IT investment cost optimization will emerge with better ROI on their investments. IT investments are positioned as so essential to core operations and integral to business success that they often remain remarkably resistant to cutbacks, even in economic downturns. Although IT investment budgets ...

Should You Shift from a Project to Product-Based Investment Approach?

Ben Chamberlain

Updated June 22, 2023

It’s been a topic of discussion by industry analysts in recent days – businesses making the move from a project to product-based investment approach. What’s the difference? In his latest white paper, UMT360 CEO Mike Gruia explains why the project-focused project and portfolio management (PPM) processes which organizations have used for the last decade are ...

The Slowdown of the Project Idea Machine

Mike Gruia, Co-founder

Updated June 22, 2023

IT spending is back up. Gartner reports the average IT spending increased by 4% in 2012 and is expected to increase by another 3.1% this year (Gartner Market Databook 4Q13 Update) reaching $3.8 trillion. The revival in IT spending suggests that progress is proceeding quickly so it may come as a surprise that many believe ...

The Evolution of Portfolio Analytics

Ben Chamberlain

Updated June 22, 2023

UMT360 CEO Mike Gruia talked a bit about the history of UMT360 when he introduced Gartner’s Donna Fitzgerald recently at the Microsoft Project Conference in Anaheim. Below is his introduction during which he discussed UMT’s history in the evolution of portfolio analytics. I’ve been fortunate to be involved with portfolio topics for the last 20 ...

Application Portfolio Management Webinar Now Available On-Demand

Ben Chamberlain

Updated July 20, 2023

With pressure to do more with less, IT leaders are turning to Application Portfolio Management (APM) to help them rationalize the operational costs so they can allocate more funds toward innovation. APM is also helping them modernize their portfolios so they have the agility needed to successfully meet changing business demands. Recently, UMT360 CEO Mike ...

UMT360 Revolutionizes Portfolio Management

Ben Chamberlain

Updated July 20, 2023

UMT’s product group, UMT360, is pleased to announce the release of its most ambitious product offering to date. UMT360 revolutionizes portfolio management by providing comprehensive, integrated solutions to help companies gain financial transparency and dramatically improve investment decisions across their projects, products and asset portfolios. UMT360 CEO Mike Gruia commented, “UMT360 is the culmination of ...