Organizational Perspective - from good to great.

Does every company has a strategic plan? Is this plan communicated to all level of organization and used for creating operational plans in every department? Are operational plans in every department even exist? A good example would be a marketing department.  If such a plan exist, is it aligned with the organizational strategic plan? Continuing as example with the marketing department, are all activities in the department, and project portfolio are driven by this plan? These are questions that any growing organization starts to ask at some point during its growth.

According to the Organizational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3), an organizational strategy can turn a good organization into a great one. And of course strategies that fail, or luck of strategy can quickly damage the organization's reputation and brand, internally and externally. "Effective strategy execution is the responsibility of all level of management, who must be involved actively and consistently to orchestrate required organizational changes and to manage the portfolio of investments that underpin these change initiatives."

An organization should have a governance mechanism that force the linkage between strategy and project portfolio. The right governance in project portfolio management provides decision-making transparency and increases likelihood of realizing desired return on investment.

 OPM3 contains the Best Practices designed to help organization to achieve that.

The OPM3 framework contains three interrelated components: Best Practices, Capabilities, and Outcomes.

Best Practices include:

• SMCI Best Practices - Standardize, Measure, Control and continuously Improve
• Organizational Enabler Best Practices - structural, cultural, technological, and human resources.

A Capability is a specific competence that must exist in the organization to be able to execute project management processes. Development of Capabilities leads to Best Practices. These capabilities determine the organizational maturity.

An Outcome is a tangible or intangible result of applying a capability.

OPM3 maturity assessment can help organization to see which Best Practices, Capabilities, and Outcomes an organization has and reveal about the organization's maturity level.  Based on the assessment an organization can create an improvement plan.


Resource: PMI, Organizational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3), Knowledge Foundation.