University of California Institute of Transportation Studies

The California Budget Act of 2016 included a provision to “complete a post-implementation review of the Project Resourcing and Schedule Management (PRSM) information technology system upgrade completed by the Department of Transportation.” The PRSM system referenced is Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) software deployed at Caltrans in 2014 and intended to enable Caltrans to effectively plan State employee and consultant time spent on activities related to projects in its Capital Outlay Support (COS) program. In this Part A report, the researchers studied PRSM as implemented and in practical use, based on a Caltrans document review and interviews conducted with sample groups of Caltrans staff. The result is this factual, non-judgmental description of how PRSM is used and what it is used for. The researchers’ initial sense from the PRSM review meetings is that over the course of three years of deployment, PRSM has become a well-established project management system for approximately 3,000 Caltrans users with read/write access and many others with read-only access, yet PRSM is not yet fully living up to its title. While PRSM is an acronym for “Project Resourcing and Schedule Management,” Caltrans is only using it for project resourcing, especially for annual budgeting, and is not using PRSM’s scheduling functions to their potential.