The Results Are In! Mr Gantt’s Big Project Management Survey

Thank you to everyone that’s taken part in Mr Gantt’s Big Project Management survey. We’ve received responses from a diverse group of professionals scattered all around the world. In this post, we’ll share some of the key findings and explain how what you’ve told us will impact the direction of the software we’re building.

Demographics

We received 107 responses to the survey, with people from as far afield as Australia and New Zealand taking part! Perhaps unsurprisingly, as the survey was in English, we got the most responses from English speaking countries.

Number of people working at your companies

This next one was quite interesting to us, as we were expecting far more respondents to be working in or running small businesses. As it turned out, those of you in companies with over 101 employees provided the bulk of responses, 54.2%, to be precise!

Your job roles and titles

This was probably the most diverse set of responses to any of our questions. We had everything from President (Hi Joe 👋) and Financial Controller to Project Managers and Programme Managers. We even had a parent complete the survey, which, needless to say, is one of the most demanding roles.

Project management training

The next part of our survey asked whether you’d received any project management training and if you had qualifications off the back of it. A whopping 78.2% of you told us that you had received some training in project management.

What project management qualifications do you have?

Those of you that told us you had qualifications then went on to tell us exactly what they were. 27% of those said they were PMP certified, with 24% studying Prince. After that, we had Agile (9%), PMI (6%), several Master's Degrees and one PhD. We should point out that many of you hold more than one of these qualifications - good work!

About your projects

OK, this is where it gets even more interesting as we asked you about the projects you run. How many you have on at any given time, how frequently they start, how long they run for and how they perform against planned costs and durations.

How many projects do you run at any given time?

The vast majority of you told us that you run less than five projects at a time, 76% of you, to be precise. If we then look at those of you running up to 10 projects at a time, the number increases to 88%. While a small proportion of you run more than 50 projects at a time (hats off), it’s clear that for most, there are less (not necessarily smaller) in progress at any given time.

How this impacts the Mr Gantt software

While this information may seem pretty innocuous, it’s helpful to us as we’re developing Mr Gantt, as it tells us how many potential projects we should aim to show in a single view at any given time.

How often do you start new projects, and how long do they run for?

31.7% of you start new projects every month, with another 30.7% starting them every quarter. While a smaller proportion, 21.8% of you start projects just once or twice a year.

The responses we received were again quite varied in terms of project length, from 1 week to over 250! The median was 16 weeks, with the vast majority (90%) running for less than a year.

What project management software do you use?

This is another question that we’ve taken a particular interest in, as understanding what you use helps us to see which features are likely important to you. We were surprised and intrigued by the high proportion of you that sees Microsoft Excel as a crucial part of your armoury, less so that Microsoft Project is high on the list, given its extensive functionality, albeit reasonably complicated for the uninitiated. Monday and Asana, please look away now, as overwhelmingly, those surveyed use other tools.

How your projects perform

This final part of the survey was significant to us, as ultimately, if you’re all delivering projects on time and to budget, perhaps you don’t need what we’re building!

Fortunately for us and less so for those with deadlines and budgets to meet, close to 60% of your projects overrun, with 50% costing more than planned. Among these stats are some of you whose projects never overrun or cost more than expected and others whose projects almost always do 😞.

Mr Gantt’s focus group

We have to admit we were somewhat taken aback by the sheer number of you who agreed to be part of our focus group - there were so many that we couldn’t invite you all! Over 60% of respondents decided to give us some of their time and expertise, which is fantastic and is already contributing to the development of Mr Gantt.

Conclusion

We hope you find these results as interesting as we did. In time, and perhaps once some of you (or all of you) are using Mr Gantt, we can redo the exercise and see whether our software and coaching from Chris Croft have made a material difference to your projects and processes.