Crossing the Great Divide

October 20, 2008 | by

No, this post isn't about the Rockies ... except in the sense that projects face a rocky road when confronting with resource management challenges ... which is, according to our research, the most common challenge in project management.

No, the divide I'm posting about is the one between projects and the executive level ... the divide between decision makers and reality. That divide is legend, but it's also apparently very real: in our latest study on Resource Management Challenges, respondents indicated that executives commonly believe that there are enough resources to accomplish projects--when the reality is quite the opposite.

Resource Management literature is filled with descriptions of “best practices” and software vendors rave about the resource management capability of their sophisticated tools. Yet study after study shows that resource management issues continue to be the number one challenge to organizations that practice project management. What are the root causes of these resource challenges and what can be done about them? And how do best-in-class organizations manage their resources differently from the rest of us? The Center for Business Practices recently conducted a survey in order to understand the issues surrounding resource management challenges and to see if we could find some possible answers to those questions, and here are some of the findings:

• Resource management maturity is low in organizations
• There is a direct connection between the level of resource management maturity and the performance of organizations
• There are significant challenges particularly in resource planning and estimating

What's particularly puzzling is that organizations fail to practice many of the resource management standards noted by the Project Management Institute. In fact, organizations don’t seem to even practice some basics consistently — like creating staffing management plans for their projects. But high-performing organizations are significantly more likely to practice these standards than low-performing organizations. Those standards in particular include:

• Resource career plans used to effectively utilize and train employees
• Information about potentially available resources used for estimating resource types
• Staff assignments are effectively negotiated with functional managers
• Scope of work and resource data is used in estimating activity durations
• The organization has a centralized pool of resources
• Resources required is used to determine the duration of activities
• Project performance reports provide information on resource performance
• Resource leveling is used to keep resource usage constant
• Resource reallocation from non-critical to critical activities is used

It isn't hard to imagine how bad resource management can cause otherwise good strategic planning and portfolio management to implode. High-performing organizations (as identified by our study) address strategy, the portfolio, AND resource issues wholistically by centering project personnel in a strong, effective PMO. They have a resource-sharing culture as well as a project management culture.

So, to us it looks like the enterprise PMO is the pass across the Great Divide: a place where strategy management, portfolio management and resource management meet and synchronize.

You can read more about my PMI paper on this subject at: Resource Optimization: The Most Significant Challenge to Project Management Effectiveness

I'm presenting it at 2:30 today. Or, stop by the booth and chat with me about it if you are in Denver this week.