IT Project & Portfolio Management

CIOs face the daunting task of evolving and modernizing a complex IT environment comprised of interrelated systems and applications to better meet business priorities and take advantage of emerging technical trends.

In addition to obvious resource constraints, two obstacles that can impede IT Leaders from effectively implementing a desired future state architecture is their ability to select and deliver the right transformation initiatives.

Today, IT demand can originate from anywhere in the organization making it difficult for CIOs to maintain visibility and control across all projects. Initiatives are commonly approved by Project Management Offices (PMOs) based on financial return without considering alignment with enterprise architectural goals; resulting in a sub-optimal transformation portfolio.

The Standish Group’s 2010 CHAOS Report confirmed that 21% of IT projects fail. Although the percentage has fallen over the last 15 years, this still equates to 1 out of 5 projects being either cancelled or never implemented. This failure rate can significantly impede the rate and speed of IT transformation.

By adopting IT Project and Portfolio Management best practices CIOs can quickly gain control across all demand, improve resource utilization and effectively deliver the right initiatives on time.

IT Project Portfolio Management powered by UMT IT 360

UMT IT 360 combines application portfolio management (APM), IT financial management and project portfolio management (PM) best practices to provide an Integrated Portfolio Management solution for managing the business of IT. By providing complete visibility across all IT assets, transformation initiatives and work, UMT IT 360 effectively extends the key phases in the PPM lifecycle (e.g. Create, Select, Plan and Manage) to deliver a comprehensive enterprise IT PPM offering. UMT IT 360 goes beyond traditional PPM capabilities to help:

• Harmonize IT asset and project governance processes
• Drive higher quality of IT demand
• Gain control across 100% of IT budget and spend
• Develop a multi-year roadmap to improve resource utilization and sourcing decisions
• Understand the reverberating impact of project funding decisions across IT domains

Derive & Control Higher Quality Demand UMT IT 360’s powerful Portfolio Analytics helps CIOs and IT Portfolio Managers undertake the required due diligence to evaluate all IT domains and proactively identify the right transformation alternatives; resulting in higher quality IT demand. By consolidating all requests in a central repository, IT Leaders gain visibility and control across all competing initiatives and can ensure each proposal is assessed against enterprise architectural goals in addition to quantifying financial return and strategic contribution.
Comprehensive IT Budgeting & Selection UMT IT 360 goes beyond centralizing new investment and enhancement projects to also consolidate operations and maintenance costs for each asset providing CIOs and CFOs with visibility across both discretionary and lights-on expenditure. Greater insight into all IT spend and the ability to instantly gauge the upstream and downstream impact of transformation alternatives across IT portfolios, helps executives improve budgeting and make informed investment decisions.
Effective IT Planning and Resource Management UMT IT 360 maintains a dynamic multi-year transformation roadmap to enhance IT planning by providing CIOs and PMOs with greater visibility into both near term and future resource requirements. This insight ultimately helps IT Leaders effectively evaluate and finalize sourcing strategies, identify and proactively overcome skill shortages and maximize resource utilization across lights-on and discretionary work.
Track Financial Performance & Understand Interrelationships UMT IT 360 helps PMOs and Finance teams connect the worlds of corporate and project accounting to measure project and portfolio financial performance and establish a benefits realization framework to track results. By recording the interrelationships between IT assets, projects and business capabilities, UMT IT 360 creates a blueprint of the entire IT portfolio helping IT Leaders better assess the impact of delaying or cancelling initiatives.