Now that we have been using our disciplined Project Management approach at Ministry for 3 years we have collected a lot of project data. Reviewing the larger projects I have observed the typical IT project work effort is provided by:
- IT – 60%
- Business – 30%
- Project Management Office – 10%
Does anyone know of similar statistics (yours or published)?
Candid CIO 
IT around 80%, and the rest is business. Our projects are usually small.
Will,
Does a project manager’s effort get counted in the IT bucket or the PMO bucket? If the latter, then 10% seems a bit low unless you are doing very few large, complex projects. I’m assuming the PMO’s time also includes project delivery assurance, consulting with project teams, facilitating meetings, and so on?
Thanks!
Kiron
Of course, being a lifelong project management advocate I applaud an explicit percentage for PM. I’ve believe in a range of between 10% and 20%. I think these variables help think through the %:
Application Complexity (relatiave to my team’s knowledge) ;
Part-time resources take more tending than full time, and correspondingly higher PM %;
Geographically distributed teams take more time than when everyone is in the same room;
New technology requires more discussion and coordination, hence more PM;
Project interdependencies – standalone projects require less PM time than those part of broader initiatives;
Size matters, too … as projects get very large (over 20,000 hours) the percentage grows, probably due to some of the above factors
Package software implementations tend to require smaller percentages than application development.