This past week Pie conducted a survey at the NorCal PMI Symposium 2008 hosted at Stanford University.

The survey question was "What are your top three challenges in migrating to a more mature process organization?"

There were close to 300 attendees (mostly project managers) and we received responses from the majority.

Here is the list of the top five areas that need the most improvement. (The percentage reflects the occurrences).

1. Enhance executive and sponsor commitment - 16%

2. Improve project knowledge and implementation - 13%

3. Improve culture - 12%

4. Improve training and skills - 12%

5. Enhance people change management - 9%

It's interesting to get a different survey results when comparing what project managers see as issues and what project management office directors see as issues.

They don't really align. (See the PMO survey blog). It's clear that that many feel there is a lack in sponsor commitment.

The second day of the conference, they setup table workshops that focused on these and other issues. The idea was to discuss the issues and come up with improvements. I was lucky to sit in on one table. The thoughts that came out of my group included adding a project process step to capture the sponsor's expectations, personal commitment, reporting needs, etc.

I captured these ideas and entered them into the Pie Community crowdsource platform as ready-to-use process steps. Any Pie beta customer can log in and contribute to these ideas and also import them into their own private Pie context from where they can implement them directly on projects.

I hope to see customers work together and share more ideas with their peers in this manner. I saw this as a great value from a conference. Not only did people let out some steam, but also banded together and came up with some real solutions that can be applied!