Page 53 - Organizational Project Management

Chapter 6—The OPM3 Cycle

leads to a grasp of the nature and scope of the Best Practices associated
with organizational project management maturity. Similarly, the Directo-
ries will clarify how Capabilities typically aggregate sequentially to com-
prise each Best Practice, based on a variety of interdependencies.

6.3.2 Step Two: Perform Assessment
The next step is to assess the organization’s degree of maturity in organi-
zational project management. Assessment involves comparing the charac-
teristics of an organization’s current state of maturity with those described
by the model. The Assessment set forth by OPM3 takes place in two phases.
The first phase is a review of which Best Practices in the Standard are and
are not currently demonstrated by the organization. The Self-Assessment
tool provided in OPM3 is one way to accomplish this. Alternative
approaches to the assessment process, based on OPM3, may be developed
by organizations in the future. For illustrative purposes, the following expla-
nation assumes use of OPM3’s Self-Assessment tool.
High-level view. Step Two first utilizes a Self-Assessment (see Appendix D)
to produce a high-level or “executive” view—including a list of the Best
Practices that currently exist in the organization, and those that do not, rel-
ative to those in the Standard. The list of Best Practices that do not cur-
rently exist in the organization may be referred to as “target Best Practices.”
The Self-Assessment also produces graphics indicating the organization’s
maturity position relative to three factors:
■ Organizational project management as a whole
■ Domains of Project, Program, and Portfolio (PPP)
■ Process improvement stages (SMCI)
Once the user knows, based on the Self-Assessment, which Best Prac-
tices need to be examined further, detailed information on each identified
Best Practice, including name and description, can be located by the unique
identifier in the Best Practices Directory.
Knowing where to focus. At this point—assuming the list of target Best
Practices produced by the Self-Assessment tool may be too large to work
with in its entirety—the organization will need to decide which Best Prac-
tices to focus on first before proceeding to the next phase of the Assessment
process. The recommended way to make this decision is to organize and
analyze the list according to the two factors most related to increasing
maturity—domain and process improvement stage. The graphics generated
by the Self-Assessment will give a general picture of strength and weakness
within these categories. The analysis of the individual Best Practices should
confirm this picture and provide a specific priority scheme, making the next
part of the Assessment more manageable.
Each entry in the Best Practices Directory indicates which domain(s) and
which process improvement stage(s) are associated with the Best Practice.
OPM3 then permits an organization to filter its list of target Best Practices,
generated by the Self-Assessment tool, grouping Best Practices by these fac-
tors. This makes it possible, for example, to create a list of all the unattained
Best Practices related to Program Management (PPP) and to Measurement
(SMCI), or to some other combination of domain and process improvement
stage.
The organization should first consider which domain(s) to address,
based on its current needs and future plans. The domains of organizational

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