Resource Management Maturity Levels Don’t Vary with Geographic Scope #pmot
Posted by Wayne Caccamo on Fri, Jun 22, 2012 @ 12:27 PM
As promised in our last blog post, we will start sharing some interesting results from the in-flight Resource Management Maturity Survey which was launched in late May. Since we have a large number of surveys completed already, we have a statistically significant amount of data for cross-tabulating results. In this blog post we will focus on the cross-tabulation of an organization's overall resource management maturity level with the geographic scope of the resources being managed. To level set, let’s review the high-level definitions of the five levels of resource management maturity as defined in the Resource Management Maturity Model (RMMM).
Level 1: Work Visibility
Organizations have visibility to who is working on what. However, resources are assigned to work without any control or oversight.
Level 2: Controlled Assignment
A formal resource assignment approval process is introduced. However, approvals are informed only by resource availability information.
Level 3: Governed Capacity
The focus shifts to capacity management and the introduction of project priority considerations requiring more structured governance.
Level 4: Schedule-driven Assignment
The resource assignment approval and capacity management processes are driven by project schedules at the phase level.
Level 5: Granular Management
Full task-level project schedule details are used to drive the resource assignment and capacity management processes.
Respondents identifying themselves at one of the maturity levels described above were cross-tabulated with the geographic scope of their IT resources. Specifically, the question regarding scope that was asked is the following:
Which option best describes the geographic scope of the resource management process that you are representing in this survey response?
The answer distribution by maturity levels is as follows:
As you can see, the maturity levels track in similar pattern regardless of whether the scope of the resource management process pertains to a single site or a globally distributed resource pool. Interestingly, moving beyond simple “work visibility” doesn’t seem to be easier to achieve if your resources are all located in a single site versus being globally deployed. And, the higher levels of resource management maturity are no more attractive or achievable when resources are consolidated or dispersed geographically.
Can we conclude anything of value from this data? I’m not sure, but I throw this out to the blogosphere to gather any of your theories.
On the one hand, you might suspect that higher levels of maturity should correlate inversely with the geographic scope of the resources deployed since the challenges of resource management should be less intractable if you eliminate global complexities. In other words, I should be able to enforce a more sophisticated process at a local level than on a global scale.
On the other hand, smaller deployments associated with limited geographic scope should, in general, have less of a need for more elaborate governance and capacity mangement process. And, larger organizations with more distributed resources should be more sensitive to resource utilization and capacity planning issues from a financial management and strategy execution perspective.
Either the challenges are all exactly the same and geo-graphic scope is not a relevant maturity delimiter *or* the challenges are quite different, but the factors that drive the need for a higher level sophistication in a global environment are counter-balanced by the inherently elevated level of complexity in getting there. In the latter scenario, of course, the converse of this would also be true that local deployments have in general less of a need to achieve higher levels of resource management maturity, but when they do, they are far more likely to be successful.
What do you think?