Chris, I think Resource Management is a very broad topic with a lot of implications and views based on your role in the organization. And given how broad it is, I think Workfront does a very good job overall of doing Resource Management. I would go as far as to say that it is the best that I have seen.
As a project manager, I am focused at managing resources at the Project/Task level and while Workfront does give me options to get realistic resource estimates in the system so that Resource Managers can see impacts to their teams, I think there are probably other capabilities that could be added that would set Workfront apart as THE Resource Management tool in the marketplace. Most of these come from thinking about the topic a way a lot of PM's do, "I hate MS Project, I wish it could do X." Every PM has said that at one point or another because while MS Project does what it does very well, it doesn't do a great job of reflecting the way things work in the real world. I'll give you an example that is one of my biggest frustrations. We have a task for Weekly Project Meetings that sits as the last task on the project in Workfront. Hence their names, these meetings happen once a week for the entire duration of the project. In this case, there is only one unknown (we know how many people are on the task, how long the meetings last, that there is one a week, and what the start date is). The only thing we don't know is Duration. Right now, I create the task, make it the estimated length of the project, add resources, and do the math to figure out how many hours that is (#of weeks x length of meeting x number of attendees). But, that is on day 1. Turns out the project went from 4 months to 5, then 8, then 11. As a result, I am constantly adjusting the Duration (because the Start date is fixed and I don't want that to change), and the number of Planned Hours (so it works out to still showing my standard half hour per week per resource). This also means as the schedule slips, I always have a task that can't be dependent on any of the other waterfalled tasks because it is only dependent on the Start Date. And let me tell you, when a schedule slips 2 months, no PM's first thought is "I need to update that Weekly Meeting task ASAP!" So, that task goes un-updated which means the resource allocations are not accurate past that point. This may seem small, but every PM at our firm has this issue and when a resource is on 30 projects, 30 half hour weekly meetings not reflecting properly in the future add up.
My biggest desire from back when I had to run everything from MS Project to now in WF is to have a task that I can be elastic and stretch with the project (connect it to a Project Start and Project Complete milestone) with a fixed amount of hours per week. No matter how much the schedule slips, Joe Smith will have that task with a half hour assigned to him.
Now, this was a really long winded way of saying if Workfront wants to be the best, don't take the approach of "let's be sure we can do what MS Project can do." It needs to be sure to take the approach of "let's do what MS Project can't do!" I feel for too long Resource Management capabilities have used MS Project as a baseline and not excelled past it.
So, all that gibberish above is to say, look for these types of things. Look for the types of things that have driven people nuts about MS Project for so long they have just accepted it as a battle scar of the job. Get a group of PMs together (in person if you have to) and have everyone sound board off of each other and whiteboard out all the stuff that MS Project has prevented them from doing for years and that can be your differentiator.
