Maturity has various meanings but from an organizational sense, it is the ability of the organization to act on its experience, to learn, change and improve, essentially what is known as the learning organization[1]. Maturity is seen as being the integration of attitude, knowledge, and action across the management of projects, programs and portfolios. A more mature organization does have a higher rate of project success.
“The central hypothesis behind the OPMM is that an organization’s ability to manage projects successfully can be assessed by analyzing key attributes that define how well project management is being carried out”[2]. OPMM is a 4-level model used to communicate maturity. The 4 stages of OPMM are:
- Stage 1: ‘ad-hoc’: In this stage, the projects simply happen. They do not have any endorsed business plans or assigned resources with no/incomplete milestones. No tracking of success or failure of the projects is done. These are typically small projects and the outcome depends on the skills of the individuals involved with the project.
- Stage 2: ‘aware’: This stage is achieved after an organization learns from the failed projects in stage 1. Formal project management methods are introduced in organizations at this stage. Project management is still not part of the organization culture and is not seen as one of its core competencies.
- Stage 3: ‘competent’: The organization at this stage has adopted project management as a core competency. The organization is aware of its capabilities and all projects are initiated only after proper business analysis has been done. The organization is quality conscious. Change and risk are always taken into consideration in such organizations.
- Stage 4: ‘best practice’: The organization at this stage is best in class and does project execution by the book. Organizations have well-developed portfolio management practices. Monitoring, measuring and improving processes are a part of the culture.
Nine maturity attributes namely methods, stakeholders, governance, capability, organization, business, support & tools, metrics and resourcing are used by OPMM to describe each stage. In essence, OPMM is a very simple and well-defined model for measuring the project process maturity within an organization and is less complex and straight forward when compared with other maturity models such as OPM3, P3M3 and CMMI.
[1] – Senge, P.M. (2006). The fifth discipline. London: Random House Business.
[2] – Knapp, M. (2019). ENTERPRISE PORTFOLIO GOVERNANCE : how organisations optimise value from their project portfolios. S.L.: Springer Verlag, Singapor. Page 98
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