UNICOM® Focal Point™ is a flexible, web-based solution enabling you to perform product and portfolio management driven by market needs and your business objectives. Focal Point is fast to get up and running and adapt to how you work with your methods, processes, and workflows. You can quickly start prioritizing and selecting the right investments, balance change with business demands and align resources to deliver the right products at the right time. Now your executives and teams can make decisions that deliver greater value to your customers and your business.
With Focal Point you can perform:
Key features of Focal Point:
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UNICOM® Focal Point™ enables you to understand what applications, systems and technologies are deployed in your organization and their value. Then you can determine which to invest in and which to retire. With UNICOM Focal Point you can perform:
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.
UNICOM® Focal Point™ provides four kinds of techniques to build priority lists:
Pairwise-comparison sessions are a great way to get your customer base or management teams involved in the hard trade-off decisions that need to be made.
Bubble chart shows projects ranked by Feasibility, Business Value - and the size of the bubble in this case equaling Financial Benefits.
Plan for delivery based on the constraints of people, money, and time.
Contact FocalPoint.Sales@unicomsi.com and request a demonstration.
Businesses face many challenges managing their application portfolio:
Application Portfolio Management (APM) is the practice of assessing the applications that run your business in terms of their business value, enhancement potential, cost, and risk. However, in most organizations, information about the application inventory, the associated technology, financial performance, business value, technical debt, and service quality is contained in a myriad of spreadsheets and systems, in people’s heads and distributed across isolated organizations. This prevents meaningful comparison and analysis of this information to enable timely decision making.
UNICOM® Focal Point™ provides a web-based, repository-driven APM solution that addresses these challenges -- enabling you to continuously assess applications through transparent and objective processes, helping teams make better and faster decisions by using information-gathering and analytics capabilities.
UNICOM® Focal Point™ enables APM in a variety of usage scenarios:
UNICOM® Focal Point™ APM features include:
Stacked Bar Chart automatically ranks and stacks Applications top to bottom based based on totaling of positive (right of y axis) and negative (left of y axis) variables
Perform What-If Analysis -- swizzle the the variables in the right-hand pane to change the effects of positive and negative variables on each Application, possibly changing the stacked ordering.
You can compare the APM analysis results to the application inventory in System Architect using the Focal "Point-System Architect" integration, visualize the APM results as analytics on the architecture, and do cause-effect analysis on the business. Create roadmaps for change. Assess the technical and business impact of application change.
APM feeds the project portfolio management process -- create project proposals for taking action to address the cost of management and maintenance of applications. Actions can range from modernizing or discontinuing applications to new development.
Contact FocalPoint.Sales@unicomsi.com and request a demonstration.
Your IT department receives continuous demands for services and solutions. Demands can range from minor enhancements to corporate applications, to major transformational initiatives based on business events, to ideas that take advantage of disruptive technologies and leap your organization ahead of the competition. It is up to the IT department to manage these demands -- prioritorize and implement them -- as well as make and defend prioritization decisions so that the wrong demands don't get attention due to executive pressure or a "squeeky wheel".
At the same time, demands are constantly changing, and some demands are very similar to but not quite exactly like others. Furthermore, demands need to be traced through to execution -- with a developed solution often satisifying some but not all of the demand.
UNICOM® Focal Point™ is designed for ideas capture and demand management in this complex environment. It enables you to:
Once new solutions or systems have been approved, they need to be fielded. This can be a complex on-going task. In most organizations, product teams are globally distributed and are developing products using their own methods and practices. You need to be sure that they are delivering the right product capabilities at the right time with the greatest efficiency. Development teams need to collaborate closely with stakeholders to ensure that they are developing the right thing, and collaborate with each other to share practices and standards. Management needs visiblity into what is going on so it can help the technical teams with resources, and manage road maps to operate within financial and resource constraints. Business and product managers need visibility into the delivery pipeline so that they can understand how things are going.
In the meantime, business requirements for what your customers or internal stakeholders want are constantly changing, as are internal factors like development resources. You need to be able to respond to changing portfolio demands by knowing exactly where you are and how you can adjust because that is going to determine how successful you are.
UNICOM® Focal Point™ is designed for delivery management in this complex environment. It enables you to:
Demand and delivery management with UNICOM® Focal Point™ enables you to scale the DevOps process, and use methods such as the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) to meet today's complex velocity challenge -- going faster, helping teams to deliver changes to the business as quickly as possible, so you can get their feedback and make sure what you're delivering has the most business value. UNICOM® Focal Point™ utilizes Open Service for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) standards to integrate seamlessly with other tools in the DevOps chain -- from requirements, to solution design, to build, test, and deployment.
You can see information in other 'friend' tools across the network -- such as requirements, change requests, action items, solution designs, tests, and application components to be deployed -- create links to relevant artifacts in those tools, then see and navigate those links at any time. OSLC creates a federated picture of corporate information to help you manage the DevOps processes of release management, testing, and deployment. Focal Point becomes the fulcrum for planning, executing, and delivering solutions.
Contact FocalPoint.Sales@unicomsi.com and request a demonstration.
How does your organization manage its on-going and planned project portfolio? How do you make sure that projects are aligned with company objectives and strategies? What is in the project portfolio? Does the portfolio include the projects that bring the most value to your company? Do the projects align with customer and internal-stakeholder requests and market demand? How well are your projects performing? What risks do you face? Have you chosen the best and most important projects to the business?
With UNICOM® Focal Point™ you can gain a 20,000-foot view of on-going and planned projects in the organization. Therefore, gaining visibility into each project's total expected cost, consumption of resources, expected timeline, benefits to be realized, and interdependencies with other projects in the portfolio. This allows an optimim mix of projects to be selected and approved while aligning them with business priorities.
UNICOM® Focal Point™ is a web-based solution with an underlying database repository, enabling people across your organization to enter and access project information based their role. Project templates can be customized to be specific to each organization or department. It can be integrated with and import data from other applications or solutions for project management and the PMO. Configurable workflows enable teams to submit project proposals, provide information to the project, and send it through reviews and an approval based on your business process. Projects can be aligned to business objectives, strategies, capabilities, demands, services, applications, technologies, and other aspects of the business.
UNICOM® Focal Point™ enables you to perform trade-off analysis of projects by using best-in-industry approaches such as pair-wise comparison, stacked bar charts with ranking schemes, and bubble charts. You can automatially determine net benefits of projects using adjustable weighting for different positive and negative criteria. You adjust the weighting of positive and negative criteria to do 'what-if' scenario analysis. This process provides understanding of the value of projects while estimating the cost of tradeoffs so that projects are set up for success and operate within resource, financial, and time constraints.
UNICOM® Focal Point™ enables you to specify and track resources assigned to projects. You can then view groups of projects in a timeline mashed against a resource-utilization historgram to red flag over-utilization issues that will cause bottlenecks. This allows you to perform more effective resource allocation, so that you can align development decisions with your overall business strategy.
UNICOM® Focal Point™ enables you to:
Contact FocalPoint.Sales@unicomsi.com and request a demonstration.
To evaluate UNICOM® Focal Point™, please send an email to FocalPoint.Sales@unicomsi.com. In the subject field ask for an Evaluation Request for Focal Point. Sales will ask you for specific information to qualify you for the evaluation.
If you would like to submit a Request for Information for a Portfolio Management tool, please send an email to FocalPoint.Sales@unicomsi.com.
Contact FocalPoint.Sales@unicomsi.com and request a demonstration.
UNICOM® Focal Point™ is a leading tool for pure Product Management -- enabling Product Managers to make decisions on what features to put into a product, what new products to build, and to develop product roadmaps based on customer priorities, competitor functionality, and market conditions. Focal Point's pure web-based capability and underlying database repository allow you to engage directly with customers. It allows them to vote on product enhancements using pairwise comparisons -- from which they emerge as part of the process and they understand how difficult the "trade-off" analysis of new features is and how easily Focal Point manages it.
UNICOM® Focal Point™ enables you to:
Use UNICOM® Focal Point™ to:
Use UNICOM® Focal Point™ to:
You can analyze the value of all the products in your portfolio, to make decisions on which products to increase investment in, which products to maintain, and which products to divest or sunset.
Harvest applications, technologies, standards, systems and data from a variety of sources of record:
Focal Point stores data in a central repository that is a database on your choice of PostGresSQL, Oracle, or DB2.
You can customize the metamodel of information captured to add object types, property sets, relationships, and possible values.
Focal Point embraces and supports both Open Service for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) and REpresentational State Transfer (REST) standards. You can create traceability links between the portfolio and related requirements, change requests, action items, or solution designs in architecture, change management, or requirements tools. A simple right-mouse click enables you to see information in other 'friend' tools across the network and create links to relevant artifacts in them, then see and navigate those links at any time. With OSLC or REST one can create a federated picture of corporate information and helps make Portfolio Management more insightful. Use this traceability to govern delivery management, and align to the DevOps processes of release management, testing, and deployment.
If you are an existing customer, please join or log into the UNICOM Customer Support Portal for Focal Point, where you will find latest help, tech support incidents, and detailed information about the product.
If you would like to submit a Request for Information for a Portfolio Management tool, please send an email to FocalPoint.Sales@unicomsi.com.
Following a relocation of its European holding company from Brussels to London, Chubb Insurance came under the oversight of the UK Financial Services Authority – creating new, more complex requirements for risk management across the whole European organization.
Chubb’s Risk Management Office developed a web-based solution built on UNICOM Focal Point software. Users across Europe can collaborate in monitoring, assessing and managing risks and controls, while senior managers can gain a real-time overview of risk status.
In an increasingly competitive marketplace, Laminar Medica wanted to improve its insight into the competition to support future business growth.
The company used UNICOM Focal Point software to create a companywide resource for competitive intelligence that supports market-driven product development and more-informed portfolio decisions.
UNICOM offers the following training classes for UNICOM® Focal Point™; contact FocalPoint.Sales@unicomsi.com for detail and dates:
Using Focal Point
1-day hands-on course
Intended Audience:
After completing this course, you will be able to:
Course Outline
Configuring Focal Point
1-day hands-on course
Intended Audience:
This is a one day course that introduces you to the UNICOM Focal Point product from the perspective of an administrator or advanced user.
This course assumes that you have a knowledge of course:
After completing this course, you will be able to:
Course Outline
UNICOM offers services for UNICOM® Focal Point™ and portfolio management through a network of highly-skilled UNICOM consultants and business partners; contact FocalPoint.Sales@unicomsi.com for more information.
Assessment of your application and technology portfolio is best performed when you integrate portfolio analysis with enterprise architecture -- allowing you to understand the impact of changes before making decisions. Then you can build transition plans and manage your project portfolio to bring the organization to new, more efficient levels.
UNICOM Focal Point™ enables you to do a thorough analysis of your Information Technology (IT) portfolio against non-architectural data points such as costs, development bandwidth, or survey results. The System Architect®-Focal Point™ integration enables you to take those results and bank them off of the enterprise architecture, so you can do visual analytics on the architecture, and quickly understand how changes to the IT landscape will affect business owners, processes, services, and capabilities.
Rapidly create an application inventory in either System Architect or Focal Point. Map applications to Focal Point and run pre-provided reports to analyze and assess applications based on business and IT value, improvement potential, and risk. Score applications against defined, prioritized, and weighted business and technical criteria. Determine what applications should be moved to the cloud, rearchitected for the cloud or mobile, retired, sustained, enhanced, consolidated, or replaced. Determine what applications should be developed as new mobile, cloud-aware, or cloud-native apps and what apps should be purchased.
Then bank the analysis results off of the application inventory in System Architect using the Focal Point-System Architect integration, visualize the APM results as analytics on the architecture, and do cause-effect analysis on the business. Create roadmaps for change. Assess the technical and business impact of application change. Select and plan portfolio transformation initiatives, such as projects for decommissioning or modernizing applications.
Understand how changes to your application portfolio impact your technology portfolio -- and vice versa. Use the enterprise architecture to assess what technologies are being used in applications and systems across the organization, where they are being used, and what effects technology risks have on the business.
Identify technology innovations that can provide new capabilities for the business. In Focal Point, assess new technologies and do trade-off analysis of their features, benefits, costs and market acceptance. Back in System Architect, use the EA to help implement governance of chosen technology standards. Then build roadmaps of new technologies, their projected costs, and the capabilities they will provide.
Use enterprise architecture to move project portfolio management out of its vacuum. Align projects and sub-projects to the capabilities they enable, the business strategies they support, and the IT portfolio they change. Map the projects to Focal Point, where your steering committe canprioritize projects based on predefined sets of criteria such as strategic fit, architectural fit, business risk, budget constraints, manpower constraints, targeted portfolio reductions, cost savings, or your own attribute set. Identify which projects are higher priority based on the needs of the business, and determine the best project portfolio mix given the constraints of manpower and costs.
Map the analysis from Focal Point back to the enterprise architecture, use analytics to visualize the project portfolio analysis, and assess the cause-effect of prioritorized projects on the enterprise. Armed with this information, you have a much higher degree of confidence for what transformation projects to pursue.
System Architect base product provides the following features:
Add-ons
Focal Point provides the following features:
Integration provides mapping-of-data capabilites between the tools.
Provides ability to link an artifact in System Architect to an artifact in Focal Point, via the OSLC CM specfiication.
Provides the following mapping-of-data capabilities between the tools:
System Architect | Focal Point |
Encyclopedia | Workspace |
Encyclopedia Workspace | Workspace |
Definition | Module, Criteria |
Property | Attribute |
Access Control Feature | View |
Provides ability to link an artifact in System Architect to an artifact in Focal Point, via the OSLC CM specfiication.