Focal Point™

With UNICOM® Focal Point™ you can perform:

• Portfolio monitoring and reporting - get greater oversight of what is going on in your portfolio
• Pipeline prioritization - prioritize the new demand coming in
• Delivery planning - planning within the constraints of people, money, and time

Portfolio monitoring and reporting

UNICOM® Focal Point™ provides business intelligence dashboards to give you a 20,000-foot view of your portfolios. It enables you to monitor them and drill down to get details of anything going wrong.

• Split your portfolio into different domains projects automatically feed information into the domain dashboards to determine the health of the portfolio from different perspectives
• Monitor how your financials are doing - actual versus what you expect in terms of costs and benefits
• Automate flagging of items on the dashboard that require your attention
• Consolidate disparate information such as risks, issues and action items linked to portfolios and projects
• Understand if you are putting your money where your mouth is in your portfolios - look at your pipeline and promote projects that help you achieve your objectives sooner
• Get better visibility of what is going on across the portfolio - define stage gates or phases that projects are going through, and understand where projects are at different phases of their lifecycle. In the early stages before projects become in flight, Focal Point provides a standard way to capture new initiatives, move them through a workflow, and collaborate on building up the business case

Planned and actual application costs in a time grid

Pipeline prioritization

UNICOM® Focal Point™ provides four kinds of techniques to build priority lists:

• Pairwise comparisons - great when there is no known quantitative data; very early on, when you are trying to get a measure of value, stakeholders can do side-by-side comparisons of initiatives using a structured process to walk through a set of comparisons to build a statistically significant result
• Configurable scorecards - you can use these comparative results to rate and rank a set of initiatives to assure they are properly aligned to your strategic objectives
• Known quantitative data from the business case - information about the costs and benefits, capital and operational expenditures, benefits you are projecting and financial risk projections
• Visualization (trade-off analysis) - you can confirm the rating and ranking process by visually displaying a set of initiatives against a selected set of variable criteria taking into account costs and benefits to the corporation. 'What-if' scenarios allow the ability to change criteria weighting factors to envision different results and decisions as to value and benefits. The scenarios are limitless and can be stored for future comparisons against answers and directions taken

Delivery planning

Plan for delivery based on the constraints of people, money, and time.

• Define the scope for a particular initiative, and model the capacity of resourcing that is required to deliver that initiative
• Graphically build a roadmap for change, and shift it around based on constraints
• Use Focal Point's workflow capabilities to move prioritized projects to the next stage in the lifecycle
• Specify distinct business needs that the project is providing. This allows you to visualize recognizable capabilities for the business, so that if you run into delivery problems, you can still deliver a reduced set of capabilities to the business rather than holding the project to ransom based on a couple of glitches
• Build a model of supply constraints and resources - how many developers do you have? You can then schedule the initiatives based on the resources available at different time periods

Detailed application roadmap