Page 25 - Organizational Project Management

Chapter 2—User Overview

Figure 2-2: The OPM3 Cycle

Assessment
Step Two: Perform Assessment. The next step is to assess the organiza-
tion’s degree of maturity in organizational project management. To do this,
an organization must be able to compare the characteristics of its current
maturity state with those described by the Model. The first phase of Assess-
ment is a review of which Best Practices in the Standard are and are not
currently demonstrated by the organization, and identifying the organiza-
tion’s general position on a continuum of organizational project manage-
ment maturity. The Self-Assessment tool provided in OPM3 is one way to
accomplish this, and organizations may develop others.
Then, in a second phase of Assessment, the organization proceeds to
gather further information at a more detailed level to determine which spe-
cific Capabilities, associated with each Best Practice, the organization cur-
rently does and does not demonstrate—and what the dependencies are
among them. The results of the Assessment step may lead an organization
to plan for improvements, repeat the Assessment, or exit the process. If
an organization elects to exit, a periodic revisiting of the Assessment step
is recommended, to monitor the effects of intervening changes.

Improvement
Step Three: Plan for Improvements. For those organizations choosing to
pursue organizational improvements leading to increased maturity, the
results of the previous step will form the basis for an improvement plan.
The documentation of which Capabilities the organization does and does
not have—including the dependencies among them—permits a ranking
of needed Capabilities and Outcomes according to their priority for the

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