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IT Resource Management Maturity Survey Interim Results #pmot

The Resource Management Maturity survey which was launched in late May is now if full swing and we are already approaching 250 completed surveys. This gives us enough statistical critical mass to confidently start drawing some high-level conclusions. The first thing we wanted to understand was the distribution of industry participants across the five levels of resource management maturity defined in the Resource Management Maturity Model (RMMM). Here are the preliminary results.

What is clear is that a large percentage (38%) of organizations in general struggle to mature their resource and capacity management process beyond the basic Level 1: Work Visibility Level. For a plurality of organizations, the ability to incorporate resource availability information (Level 2: Controlled Assignment) and project priority information (Level 3: Governed Capacity) is still a work-in-progress.

Another, obvious conclusion is that there is a major drop-off in the number of organization at Level 4 and Level 5. This was predicted by the RMMM which characterized the transition from Level 3 to Level 4 as a chasm crossing.

At Level 3, resources are managed at the "project" level rather than at a more granular level like project phase or task level. In other words, at Level 3 resource management is essentially a top-down process as opposed to the next level of maturity where resource assignments are driven bottom-up from the project Work Breakdown Schedule (WBS) at either the project phase level (Level 4) or detailed project activity level (Level 5).

Managing resources at the "project" level of detail, provides most of the benefits organizations desire in terms of the ability to assign resources to the highest priority projects, manage capacity to meet existing and future demand, and track project and portfolio costs.

At the same time, it doesn't burden organizations with the additional process complexity associated with bottom-up resource management. The key business benefit of more granular resource management control -- the ability to accommodate incremental demand with existing resources in a highly time/schedule constrained environment -- may not be justified simply because of the potentially onerous information and supporting technology complexity and process maturity demands. That’s why the RMMM concludes that Level 3 is the “sweet spot” for most organizations.

This is just the tip of the iceberg as we will be sharing more preliminary data cuts such as resource management maturity level by industry, size of organization, and geography. And, of course we will be honing our maturity level definitions and descriptions by correlating overall maturity level with maturity level data along  the various dimensions defined in the model including assignment granularity, project roles, resource costs, resource approval, capacity planning, governance and business value. Stay tuned.