I recently presented Pie at the CBP Summit 2008 in Scottsdale, AZ. The conference is one of the top PMO (Project Management Office) events in the US.

Most attendees where PMO directors from large enterprises. We had the opportunity to conduct a conference survey for all the attendees.

The survey asked "what are the top 3 best practice needs for project implementation that you would like to discuss with your peers?".

We received about a 90% response rate. The result displayed 34 different process standard needs. The following are the top five:

1. Resource Management - 17%

2. Risk Management - 8%

3. Portfolio Management - 8%

4. Project Management - 6%

5. Financial Management - 6%

This is an interesting statement showing where the pain is in the project industry from the PMO perspective.

I would assume that resource management is also the top challenge project managers face since their issues funnel up to the PMO and upper management. This was not unexpected since many of our beta customers have asked PIEmatrix for more resource management features. However, it's great to be able to show real metrics from the market.

Further in the conference we learned that within resource management, the challenges include utilization management, motivation, skills mapping, etc. One breakout workshop came up with some shared best practice needs and example solutions.

At the conference we captured this data in our new PIEmatrix crowdsource-community platform. This opens up the ability for the PMO directors to go back to their offices and continue to discuss and share best practices with their peers.

This is still a work in progress, but the need in the market to collaborate on resource management pains is very clear.