United Management Technologies in Order

United Management Technologies In order to be able to identify the competitive advantages that the UMT product portfolio has over other companies, we need to briefly describe the processes that UMT has been developing, along with the most important products and services that go along with this activity. As mentioned, UMT operates in the project portfolio management business. This basically refers to anything project-related within a company.

It is common knowledge that the process of creating a successful portfolio of projects, along with selecting the proper projects that would help maximise the company value and with the subsequent management of this portfolio, including here notions such as portfolio planning and portfolio tracking, are among the most important activities within a company, activities that would help determine the level of success the respective company will have.

UMT has developed a successful platform that covers the entire circuit of project portfolio management, integrated with a successful consulting experience from UMT consultants (as mentioned, UMT's consultancy activity goes back all the way to 1989). From this brief introduction, we are already able to identify some of the company's competitive advantages. First of all, the UMT product portfolio covers with its software applications the entire project management spectrum.

The company has developed applications that deal with creating a portfolio of projects, selecting the most advantageous projects according to their relative importance and to their individual impact on the company's strategic drivers, planning the workflow and tracking the portfolio into the future. Other companies have selected a specific activity in project portfolio management and have chosen to develop a product specifically on that sector. Take even Microsoft, for example. Their Microsoft Planner refers to portfolio planning and resource allocation.

On the other hand, the consultancy activity that UMT has been successfully been developing ever since its beginnings ensure several important things. First of all, the consultants help a smooth implementation of the developed software, with all necessary technical advice and help that the client needs. Second of all, the role of the consultants is essential in translating the client's business needs into the requirements for the UMT team of programmers. Third of all, UMT also provides the training and documentation needed for all application it delivers to the client.

In my opinion, the most important competitive advantage that UMT holds over other companies is its capacity to cover the entire spectrum of needs that the client may have. The four steps of project portfolio management that UMT's products and services cover are business case creation, portfolio optimization, portfolio planning and portfolio tracking. The Portfolio Builder software, also known as the Central Repository, centralizes all project-related data into one single, easy to use application.

Building a portfolio of projects is generally associated with cumbersome spreadsheets, all kind of different databases containing information on specific projects etc. It is always difficult to have a wholesome picture of the projects at hand. The Central Repository helps exactly in this sense: all variables associated with a project and that determine its main characteristics are contained within this application.

The application has several other advantages, among them the capacity of calculating risk and a project's strategic value, but also the availability for collaboration on a certain projects via a workflow approval process. In my opinion, however, the main competitive advantage of this particular product is the fact that it is able to deliver all this amount of data on a project in one single, easy to coordinate and manoeuvre application. The Portfolio Optimizer tool helps with the selection phase of the project portfolio management activity.

In my opinion, this is one of the most important and difficult phases of the process and UMT has developed an unique tool, a tool which represented a significant part of its success on the market. Selecting the projects is not only an economics activity where a company is limited by a set of constraints and it needs to work out which projects it should best work on within these limitations.

It is also a matter of choosing the projects that best maximise the company's value by having the greatest impact on the company's strategic drivers. The scope is thus two-fold: first of all identifying a set of strategic drivers for the company and, second of all, choosing, in conditions of economic constraints, the projects which have greatest impact on these drivers.

The UMT Portfolio Optimizer has been developed using algorithms that the three partners have developed in the 90s and is definitely unique in the business environment in which UMT evolves. The greatest competitive advantage for the company's product in this case is represented by the product's uniqueness: there is no such product on the market and the company's clients have already been accustomed to this method of optimizing their project portfolio. The Portfolio Planner is an important tool that helps senior managers optimize their human resource by optimizing staff allocation.

The idea is that the human resource in a company needs to be fully utilized during a certain period of time. On the other hand, one needs to take into consideration issues such as milestones (deadline for the projects or part of the projects), project dependencies (one project cannot be done before another project or two projects need to be performed in the same time) or priorities (project A is more important than project B, hence, it will be done first).

In this sense, it is difficult without an application such as the Portfolio Planner to ensure optimized resource allocation. Nevertheless, the Portfolio Planner is a weak spot in the entire.