How to do rapid and agile top-down planning and budgeting in the days of Covid-19, with UMT360

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Just a few months back, when you completed your budget plans for 2020, did you ever think the economy, and life, would be changed as dramatically as it has? Covid-19’s impact will be felt throughout 2020, and over the coming years.

It’s time to think about how to quickly adapt your 2020 budget and prepare for your 2021 planning and budgeting cycle.

UMT360’s Portfolio Manager provides a unique, easy, and top-down approach to comparing programs and projects, and performing what-if analysis to help you ensure you’re getting the best return on investment from your programs.

Western Principles can help you get started.

What do you need to facilitate planning?
Planning and budgeting need to be done with respect to a holistic picture of dollars, benefits, and people.
Also, projects may be planned and executed in any number of systems – including Microsoft Project, Azure DevOps, Jira, and more – and you need a holistic picture of all of that.
To complicate the picture, in these times of social distancing, and work from home, how will you do planning and budgeting in 2020?

That’s where UMT360’s Portfolio Manager comes in.
The UMT360 Portfolio Manager provides a hub that integrates tightly with your project and portfolio management system and your ERP system – aggregating information and allowing you to do the analysis you need to do to make your planning and budgeting decisions, fast.
It also allows you to create “what-if” scenarios to evaluate how to change and adapt quickly to changing conditions – like the Covid-19 virus and related fall-out.

Let’s look at 5 elements of planning and budgeting where UMT360 will improve your process.
Derive Execution from Strategy (from projects to products)
Projects are are always part of a bigger plan – a program. The program may bring together multiple projects from the same department, or different departments, or even among several companies. With project-by-project analysis, you may end up missing key projects and blowing away programs entirely.

UMT360 gives you the right investment perspective on Programs and Products so that you can prioritize all investments and provide top-down direct line-of-sight from strategy through execution.

Adopt a Continuous / Dynamic Planning Model
An annual plan and budget is only a snapshot in time. It’s static, and even before it’s approved, the world will have changed. You’ll be arms deep in spreadsheets trying to adapt.

With UMT360’s Portfolio Manager, you quickly move form a static annual plan to a continuous or rolling-wave planning model. This allows you to easily and dynamically adjust priorities to reflect changing needs and realities – like the impact of Covid-19 on your business. UMT360 provides your organization the agility to optimize spend and maximize value.

Maximize Resource Utilization
Too often planning and budgeting is done in silos, and only with respect to costs. It misses the mark on cross-functional resource capacity planning of your most important assets – your people.

UMT360’s Portfolio Manager allows you to see costs, benefits, and resources all at the same time, and to look at the impact of adding, removing, or moving projects and your capacity plans.

Generate Cost Transparency
In a typical budgeting cycle, projects are considered from a bottom-up perspective, as individual components to a program. This is complex and results in problems of double-counting or in missing key component projects from a program.

The UMT360 Portfolio Manager gives full cost transparency to your programs. This allows you to allocate money to programs and to allocate it down to the project level.

Generate Roadmaps to help visualize and manage dependencies across the enterprise
Programs are made up of projects. When you have cross-functional teams working on programs, they all have their own project plans, which may be in stand-alone systems, and it’s hard to get good visibility into the dependencies and progress.

UMT360’s Portfolio Manager helps you automate and maintain strategic roadmaps to develop the ability to visualize, understand and manage the relationships between all investments and the strategic capabilities they are intended to impact.

With the UMT360 Portfolio Manager, you have visibility over your programs, projects, resources, budgets, and benefits. This visibility gives you control and the ability to do what-if analysis.
In volatile times, like the Covid-19 pandemic, you need to do planning and portfolio management more than ever.

Western Principles is a gold-certified UMT360 partner, and a Microsoft Gold PPM partner. We can help you with your portfolio management, this year, to help you with planning and budgeting in the face of Covid-19.

Visit us on the web at www.WesternPrinciples.com, call us at 1-800-578-4155, or email us at info@westernprinciples.com.

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