United Management Technologies, Leader on

¶ … United Management Technologies, leader on the project portfolio management. The choice is motivated by an almost 3-years working experience I have had with them, which explains the thorough knowledge of their products, objectives and business styles. UMT started somewhere at the end of the 80s, in 1989, as a consulting company. The three founders, Mike Gruia, Gil Makleff and Yorai Lindberg, thought out to operate on a consulting niche, as they couldn't possibly find the resources to match the likes of Ernst and Young or Pricewaterhouse Coopers.

As such, the company created and developed an inventive project portfolio management mechanism that was deemed to evaluate and identify the proper connections between a client's strategic objectives and drivers and the projects that the respective client wished to perform. Given the limited budget that a company can dispose of, an optimization tool ruled out the projects that could be included in the budget and that would, at the same time, be the ones increasing the value of the company through the impact on the strategic objectives.

The software products that UMT has developed follows the entire circuit in the evolution of a project portfolio, from brainstorming a set of initial projects (Portfolio Builder) to selecting the projects that maximize company value by impacting the main objectives, to planning and managing after selection (Portfolio Planning and Portfolio Dashboard). Other successful applications include the Central Repository and UMT Portfolio Manager 3.2.

As the company managed to successfully operate a niche that combined consultancy service with software products (as one of the partners themselves put it, UMT was at the very beginning a consultancy company which used software, now it tends to become a software company that sometimes performs consultancy services), it became a market leader in project portfolio management and related products. Its main competitors can be traced among companies offering similar services, Pacific Edge or Primavera counting among them.

Trends in the industry are difficult to determine, but one thing is certain: innovation plays an extremely important role. This is mainly due to the fact that one may arrive at the conclusion that, at a certain point, all things have been discovered, all software products related to consultancy have been laid out and that any modifications can only be in design or in the programming techniques used.

Indeed, any company that would be able to offer, at this point, something completely innovative on the market, is a sure winner in the long run. At the same time, many companies are likely to have long-term clients. UMT, for example, has been working with a division of JP Morgan ever since its early days in the beginning of the 90s.

The fact that this type of products usually need to be highly customized and a close relationship with the customer is often required in order to create the custom product required. In terms of customer served, United Management Technologies has always opted for some of the biggest names in different industries. The resources that the company disposes of can now fulfil some of the highest exigencies in the industry.

Among the company's clients, one can enumerate JP Morgan, AXXA, a division of Ford Motors, Wachovia (fourth largest bank in the United States) etc. Among the most important elements that determine customer satisfaction are customization level, assistance for implementation, technical assistance after implementation. First of all, as previously mentioned, the software products that UMT creates for its clients need to be fully fitted to the customer's needs. This means everything ranging from design to interface, to the application's functionality in every way.

It is often the case that a certain product needs to be modified and several versions need to be created in order to fit the exact requirements of the client. For example, client X required a dashboard where each of the projects' variables would have been automatically calculated and a red-yellow-green would have been awarded to each of the project, in order to determine the project's status at a certain moment of time.

Another client using the same product required that the red-yellow-green grades should be noted manually, with comments and motivations in each case. As such, for a product that basically had the same functionality, two slightly different versions needed to be created. Assistance for implementation refers to all operations required for the client to be able to start using the UMT application. In many cases, the client purchases not one, but several tens of licenses, for all its employees.

Implementation first requires the instalment on the server and, subsequently, installing the application on each of the individual computers. The server and network manager needs to fully understand all the technical requirements for further operation and a two-week technical course is usually held with him even before the application is installed with the client. Technical assistance after implementation is crucial in developing an excellent relationship with the client. First of all, all products can be customized even after implementation.

As all relationships with the clients are defined by UMT as long-term relationships, the UMT team needs to be able to accommodate any request for change that the client may have after implementation. It is often the case that the testing team at UMT has not been able to identify all the possible programming and operational errors and a period of 1-3 months is necessary to solve all problems that will inherently appear after the product begins to be used within the client's business activity.

Further more, post-implementation assistance is also associated with training sessions with the client's employees, sessions that have the role of implementing basic usage techniques with the consumer. These sessions also create the premises for subsequent versions, as it is often the cases that suggestions are made by the client for product improvements. Constant feedback from the client is a must in the post-implementation.