Enterprise PPM: The blog site for PPM practitioners and stakeholders across the enterprise

Brad Egeland is a Business Solution Designer and IT/PM consultant and author with over 25 years of software development, management, and project management experience leading initiatives in Manufacturing, Government Contracting, Gaming and Hospitality, Retail Operations, Aviation and Airline, Pharmaceutical, Start-ups, Healthcare, Higher Education, Non-profit, High-Tech, Engineering and general IT. Brad is married, a father of 9, and living in sunny Las Vegas, NV. Visit Brad's site at http://www.bradegeland.com/.

If you haven't had a chance to download the IT Resource Management Global Study Results white paper, the complimentary document is available for immediate download from the Instantis web site. For your convenience, you will find the complete table of contents below so you can get a pretty good idea of what you are going to get before making the effort (as minimal as it is) to access this ground-breaking primary research.

Recently, we published  the “IT Resource Management Maturity – Global Study Results” white paper. Blog followers have already been previewing results and interesting conclusions as they have become available during the data collection process. In this article, we review all of the broad observations and conclusions that can be drawn from the study results and list them in one place (i.e., this post). To put it all in context,  however, you should download the complete 43-page document from the Instantis web site which synthesizes the survey results from over 500 participating indusry and government organizations.

Today we announced the publication of  the “IT Resource Management Maturity – Global Study Results” white paper. If you have been following this blog you know that we have been previewing results and interesting conclusions as they have become available during the data collection process. Now, we are happy to make the complete complimentary white paper available for immediate download from the Instantis web site.

We’ve been talking about our vision of Enterprise PPM (the theme of this blog) for a while. We define Enterprise Project & Portfolio Management (EPPM) as the practice of taking a more integrated and top-down approach to managing all project-intensive work and resources across the enterprise. This contrasts with the more common approach of building separate functional and technology silos to manage a variety of "business function" portfolio types in an integrated way. These include IT PPM, new product development, process improvement and other enterprise initiatives, programs and project management offices (PMOs).

As part of our global study on IT resource management, we looked at practices used by organizations of all sizes, industries and geographies to assign resources to projects based on project role and resource attributes like skills and certifications. What we observed from the data is that, in practice, there is no clear progression of maturity levels with respect to the specification and utilization of project role information as we hypothesized in the Resource Management Maturity Model (RMMM). Most organizations can specify distinct roles, but do not go beyond specifying basic attributes like cost rate. This was true for organizations that in general achieve very high maturity levels.

In my last post I shared the results of an IT resource management benefits gap analysis associated with our global study on IT resource and capacity management processes and maturity levels. I identified the largest gap between current or realized resource management benefits and desired (and not yet achieved) benefits as the ability of the resource management process to positively impact project outcomes. Specifically, 37% of survey respondents cited "Increased project success rates and improved cycle times via timely assignment of the right resources” as being a desired, but unrealized, benefit of their resource management initiatives.

We are now winding down the data collection phase of our global study on IT resource and capacity management processes and maturity levels. As promised in this Blog I will continue to share and preview some of the results and conclusions. This week I took a look at current realized benefits of resource management practices and processes as well as desired and achievable benefits. By overlaying current benefits with targeted future benefits, we can identify the gaps between where the majority of organizations are today with their IT resource management initiatives and where they hope to go. As discussed below, the largest gap relates to the ability of the resource management process to positively impact project outcomes.

The Resource Management Maturity Survey is in its last phase of data collection and we are approaching 500 responses. With this sample size we can share some statistically significant  response cross-tabulations in advance of the completion of the survey and final analysis. In a previous blog post we looked at how resource management maturity levels correlate with the number of resources being managed. In this post we will examine the maturity levels of PPM governance processes as defined by the Resource Management Maturity Model. We will then see if or how the maturity of governance processes is affected significantly by the number of resources being managed.

It’s time to dissect the Gartner “Magic Quadrant for Cloud-based Project and Portfolio Management Services” published June 27, 2012. Thirteen vendors were prodded, probed and ultimately plotted. It’s easy to get pixel envy and focus on the MQ graphic and not the vendor commentary. Each vendor gets three strength and three caution bullets. From what I can tell, the strengths are relative to the vendor itself as well as relative to the cloud competition. They don’t seem to be overtly relative to the broader PPM vendor landscape (i.e., relative to the traditional on-premise providers).