Page 48 - Organizational Project Management

Chapter 5—The OPM3 Directories

a brief description of each Best Practice. It also indicates how each Best
Practice maps to the domains of organizational project management and
to the four stages of process improvement. As explained in Section 6.3.2,
this mapping allows the organization to focus its efforts on those Best Prac-
tices related to the domains and stages of greatest importance to them—
without having to understand the entire set of Best Practices in the
Directory. The Best Practices Directory appears in Appendix F.
The Capabilities Directory provides detailed data on all of the Capabili-
ties in the model, organized according to the Best Practices with which they
are associated. The Capabilities Directory is central to the second part of the
Assessment process, in which the user is able to determine—through the
observance of Outcomes—which Capabilities associated with a given Best
Practice currently exist in the organization and which do not, in prepara-
tion for decisions regarding potential improvements.
Each Capability in this Directory is assigned a unique identifier corre-
sponding to its position within the Best Practice. (These Capability unique
identifiers are also referenced in the Improvement Planning Directory.) The
Capabilities Directory gives a name and description for each Capability, and
indicates how the Capability is categorized by domain, process improve-
ment stage, and PMBOK Guide process group. For each Capability, there
®
is a list of the Outcome(s) (with Key Performance Indicators) that should
be confirmed to claim the existence of the Capability—this process is
explained in Section 6.3.2. Where there are multiple Outcomes associated
with a Capability, OPM3 places them in a suggested sequence based on pri-
ority. The Capabilities Directory appears in Appendix G.
The Improvement Planning Directory is provided to show the dependen-
cies between Capabilities, which are essential to the Assessment and
Improvement steps of the OPM3 Cycle. Once the organization has identi-
fied Best Practices requiring comprehensive assessment, this Directory will
indicate the Capabilities leading to each of these Best Practices, along with
any additional Capabilities on which they may depend. (Refer to Figure
3-4.) These dependencies result in a sequence in which the various Capa-
bilities aggregate to the Best Practice, which also serves as a suggested path
by which an organization could approach improvements in maturity. See
Sections 6.3.2 and 6.3.3 for further information.
The user can print pages from this Directory pertaining to any identified
Best Practice and use these pages as a checklist or template when assessing
the existence of Capabilities and planning for any improvements. For each
Capability, there is a column of boxes where the user can check off the exis-
tence of the Outcome(s) associated with that Capability.
The path to maturity within a Best Practice may cross paths leading to
other Best Practices. OPM3 identifies numerous Best Practices whose exis-
tence depends upon the existence of other Best Practices. This kind of rela-
tionship implies corresponding dependencies between the Capabilities that
aggregate to those different Best Practices. These dependencies are repre-
sented by the Capability order shown in the Improvement Planning Direc-
tory. The Improvement Planning Directory appears in Appendix H.
All three directories reside on the OPM3 CD-ROM and may be accessed
through filters and searches.

32 ©2003 Project Management Institute, Four Campus Boulevard, Newtown Square, PA 19073-3299 USA