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Chapter 3—Best Practices

3.5 CATEGORIZATION OF BEST PRACTICES
AND CAPABILITIES WITHIN OPM3

Best Practices and Capabilities in the OPM3 Standard are mapped to two
key factors—domain and stage.
As introduced in Section 1.4 and further explained in Chapter 4, the term
“domain” refers to the three domains of Project, Program, and Portfolio
Management. Each Best Practice and Capability in the Standard is identi-
fied with one or more of these domains of organizational project manage-
ment.
The term stage refers to the stages of process improvement. The concept
of process improvement, to make a process “capable,” became widely
adopted in industry and government as a result of the Quality Movement,
which had its roots in the work of W. Edwards Deming and Walter Shewart
as far back as the 1920s. Their work became the de facto Standard for
process improvement, laying out the sequential stage of improvement as
1) Standardize; 2) Measure; 3) Control; 4) continuously Improve. The
sequence implies a prerequisite relationship between the stages, in that the
most advanced stage, continuous improvement, is dependent on a state
of control, which is, in turn, dependent on measurement, which is depen-
dent on standardization.
Each Best Practice and Capability in the OPM3 Standard is associated
with one or more of these process improvement stages.
In addition to these categorizations, Capabilities in OPM3 are also
mapped to the five project management process groups (Initiating, Plan-
ning, Executing, Controlling, and Closing) set forth in the PMBOK Guide.
®
This helps identify Capabilities that will enable organizations to implement
these processes successfully, within each of the three domains, or at each
of the process improvement stages.

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