The resource management tools that organizations use should be able to map employee skill and experience to tasks that need to be done, document and track resource assignments, flag risks from over-committed resources, and identify under-utilized ones. The Cognitive Technologies’ 2010 resource management survey sought to understand what tools organizations use today to manage their project assets and the degree to which they feel that the tools give them the information needed to plan effectively and make decisions. Our 2010 survey benefited from the responses of 250 individuals representing a broad range of companies and management responsibilities.
To find out what resource management tools were in use across in the organizations surveyed, we provided a checkbox list of 20 common tools from which respondents could select one or multiple tools. Selecting “no tool” or “other” were options. The top ten resource management tools were:
| Project Resource Management Tool | Frequency |
| Microsoft Office Excel | 160 |
| Microsoft Office Project | 157 |
| In-house developed application | 93 |
| Microsoft Office Project Server | 74 |
| Other | 48 |
| Microsoft Office Access | 40 |
| Oracle Primavera | 24 |
| CA Clarity Project and Portfolio Management Software | 19 |
| Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise Applications | 17 |
| Hewlett-Packard Project Portfolio Management | 11 |
The tools vary by cost and capability with the higher-end tools running several thousand dollars and the Microsoft tools costing in the hundreds of dollars per user. However, purchase cost does not reflect the total cost, since less expensive tools require more application development time to provide useful resource management information. The biggest difference in capability between the high-end, mature tools and the Microsoft Office-based tools is the ability offered by mature tools to track multiple projects concurrently, maintain information about a centralized pool of resources, and provide information in near real time.
Not surprisingly, companies using mature resource management tools were more likely to report that their tools provide timely and sufficient information. They tracked employee time and project status at a more detailed level than those companies using less mature tools did. They were also more likely to have dedicated resource managers and to employ more standardized resource allocation processes. We also found that companies using sophisticated resource management tools tended to have higher annual revenues, undertake more projects per year, and support a larger project management staff than organizations using less sophisticated tools.
The number of respondents who reported that the tools they use do not provide timely information to support decision-making increased from 33 percent to 45 percent from our 2009 survey. Only 30 percent of the companies used their resource management tools to track employee project time at the task level and 14 percent used a formal process for evaluating resource needs across existing projects. More than half – 70 percent — of the respondents said that their resource management tools were not used to find project resources based on skills and experience. Rather, companies allocated resources in an ad hoc fashion for new projects based on the perceived priority of the project.
Next week, I will offer our thoughts and conclusions gained from correlating several bits of data and discuss challenges the project managers and senior management see in the future of resource management.
Fear No Project Blog - Focusing on the Management Side of Projects 
November 29, 2010 at 5:28 pm
Thank you for your articles, Bruce, they are very informative and insightful. I am a consultant and trainer for Mid-State Solutions, an Oracle (Primavera) Partner. Indeed, P6 as a scheduling tool provides extensive solutions for resource management down to the task level, enabling organizations to have comprehensive reports of resource allocation and indicators for over- or under-allocation, as well as resource leveling functions to help alleviate these issues. Resources are able to be defined by experience so they can be easily assigned to the necessary roles for a given task.
I also empathize with Bruce Lofland’s comments on your previous article. And would add that as a consultant it can be time consuming to report in that level of detail time spent on tasks, but as a manager, having that level of detail makes proper allocation the first time that much easier. A bit of a conundrum for organizations.
December 13, 2010 at 1:53 am
A very interesting article to read. I am also interested to find out if someone has done a survey to understand why do so called”mature applications” fail to deliver. Could it be simply because the employee wh have to fill their time cards daily find it cumbersome, tedius, repititive (with some other management tool) and a management overhead task ? Our employee management tool (www.timemerlin.com) is lot simpler but able to handle all types of project scheduling needs.
April 26, 2012 at 6:47 am
[…] Over the next couple of weeks, I plan on talking about the type of PM tools that support the needs of each octane level of project. I will focus on commonly used PM tools. Some of my thoughts are based on the Resource Management survey conducted by Cognitive Technologies Inc., last year (Tools for Resource Management – The Survey Results). […]