Combat the recession with Project Intelligence

Johannesburg, 25 Aug 2009

Addressing the current economic crisis, local enterprise project management (EPM) solution provider, UMT South Africa (UMT SA), has announced that it offers project and portfolio management solutions to assist management with making calculated decisions in terms of spend.

While project and portfolio intelligence allows a business to better plan and consolidate its efforts with the assistance of dashboards, it also enables management to measure spend across departments.

UMT SA CEO Pieter Meyer says although business intelligence (BI) is regarded by most executives as a business-critical tool, there is a new wave linking the value of business intelligence to project portfolio management, assisting executives to make intelligent business decisions.

“Traditionally, line management managed the control spend from a strategic perspective, but spend across head of departments is still difficult to control due to ownership and accountability.”

The global trend, to survive the recession and to ensure long-term sustainability, is for organisations to align strategic objectives with effective delivery of projects. Efficient project delivery has been highlighted with the recession, ensuring that companies spend less, deliver on time and deliver quality products and solutions.

“Improving delivery and reducing spend, especially during the current competitive business climate, can be determined by an organisation's ability to efficiently align resources and business activities with strategic objectives and could mean the difference between success and failure,” he explains.

Organisations are increasingly managing their activities and processes as projects, 'projectising' the business - to closely monitor performance and make better business decisions about the overall work portfolio. By planning and tracking projects with clarity and precision, organisations can respond with greater agility to the demands of a fast-changing business environment.

Companies still tend to restructure or realign their strategic direction to cater for the demands of rapidly changing business processes and technology. This tendency could result in project management efforts being ignored. Approximately 75% of companies do not align their mission-critical objectives with their existing efforts in project management. Projects must be consistent with an organisation's long-term goals and all projects should be done to improve businesses and should have a business rationale from the outset.

Meyer says the success or failure of a project should be traced back to the strategic business plan or to a balanced scorecard matrix. “Although companies are changing from a functional to a more process-driven environment, no changes are being made to the project management process.”

UMT SA focuses on ”Project Intelligence” by collecting and consolidating relevant data and enabling processes to support management with their decision-making process through dashboard reports, practical day-to-day collaboration, workflow management and linking project and portfolio management to strategic business value.

In conclusion, Project Intelligence will assist executives, middle management and programme managers to consolidate initiatives to make sound business decisions that will save money and deliver maximum value to ensure sustainability.

For more information, contact UMT SA on (012) 345 3518 or visit http://www.umtsa.co.za.

UMT SA

UMT SA is the largest project, program and portfolio management solutions implementation partner in South Arica and has serviced more than a 100 of the country's leading organisations with its offerings. UMT SA recently concluded a BEE transaction whereby the Notsi Group owns a 25% shareholding in the ordinary share capital of the company. The company is equipped with sound staff values, capacity to deliver on its promise, practical knowledge, and it has a BEE partner that actively participates and contributes to the company's success.

UMT Project and Portfolio Management Services South Africa (UMT SA) was formed through the merger of Fulcrum Business Solutions, South Africa's leading provider of enterprise project management solutions, and UMT Portfolio Management SA, the leading portfolio management organisation.

Since 1989, both UMT and Fulcrum Business Solutions have pioneered the field of project and portfolio management and devised unique methodologies that, when combined with effective project management, enable an integrated link between strategy formulation and execution. UMT SA contributes to its clients' success by linking business and IT strategies to execution through day-to-day activities leading to improved performance and tangible projects delivery results.

UMT SA methodology, training, mentorship and coaching approach assist organisations successfully to deploy practical and essential project, program and portfolio management processes, templates, systems and governance solutions across their multi-disciplinary divisions or departments.

UMT SA solutions that consistently help its clients build capabilities that support effective business decision-making and enhance business delivery performance. Its objective is to assist its clients in ensuring the operational delivery of their strategy through effective project, program and portfolio management.

UMT SA is a Microsoft Gold Certified partner and a Microsoft Project, Portfolio and Sharepoint Server implementation partner.

According to UMT SA CEO Pieter Meyer, the time has passed to just improve on your delivery processes but to introduce a new way of collaborating between team members, program and project managers, senior managers and executives. “Organisations need to enable and revive their processes by introducing a responsibility, accountability, consult and inputs (RACI) formal governance framework to their projects environments and to use workflow that will manage the governance outputs. Role-based delivery management methods will become very important in any organisation wanting to ensure return on investments in their project delivery space.”

UMT SA has delivered services and solutions and is currently engaging in the following countries: USA, Uganda, Mauritius, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Botswana, Namibia, Dubai, Ghana, United Kingdom, Hong Kong and Brazil.

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