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Managing the IT Resource Management Talent Pool

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.

The specific question we asked and response choices were as follows:

The fact that most organizations can specify distinct roles, but do not go beyond specifying basic attributes, was true for organizations that in general achieve very high maturity levels (i.e., Level 3 and Level 4 as defined by the Resource Management Maturity Model) as well as those at the lower levels of maturity (i.e., Level 1 and 2). At Level 5 of the RMMM however, organizations leverage granular resource role and attribute definitions like "Responsible", "Accountable", "Consulted", "Informed" using RACI or other models for further classifying task-level resource assignments.

The process of collecting and bringing to bear in the formal project resourcing process more advanced resource attributes such as skills, certifications, training location preference, etc., does not necessarily mean that these factors are not considered. It means they are not considered within the framework of the formal resource governance process. They may very well come to play in the back room horse trading that happens between the IT governance allocation process and the project management assignment practice. At the very highest level of resource management maturity where task level assignment of resources is part of a formal bottom-up resourcing process, very little happens that is outside of the radar of the formal resource management governance process.

While I am on the topic of looking at the role of defining and leveraging project roles in the resource management process, I can also report data on how the overall level of an organization’s resource management maturity is perceived by resource management governance role or stakeholder. What we can observe is that regardless of respondent role in the IT resource management process, perceptions of overall maturity levels track similarly with the exception of IT executives and managers (see green line in chart below). This could result from “out of touch” management misperceptions or a real difference reflecting self-selection of respondents that own, sponsor or champion these processes at a higher level in the organization and as a result are farther along the maturity curve.

The chart below is a cross-tabulation of the overall resource management maturity level of the respondent's organization as perceived by the respondent with the respondent's role in the IT resource governance process.