Page 54 - Organizational Project Management

Chapter 6—The OPM3 Cycle

project management provide a path of progression to maturity. The most
logical place to start would be with the domain of Project Management,
later progressing to the domains of Program and Portfolio Management.
However, there are interactions between the domains, such as flows of
information or the development of policies, which require Capabilities in
domains other than the one on which an organization may want to focus.
These interactions are identified through the interdependencies shown in
the Improvement Planning Directory that will be discussed later.
Once an organizational project management domain has been selected
as a starting point, the organization next needs to consider the stages of
process improvement. As mentioned in Sections 1.4 and 3.5, there is a nat-
ural progression of maturity from Standardization, to Measurement, Con-
trol, and continuous Improvement. Thus, the logical starting point for the
second part of the Assessment process, within any domain, would be to
start with the category of process standardization.
If the Self-Assessment indicated that the organization had a fairly high
level of maturity in process standardization, it may still want to review the
remaining unachieved Best Practices that are mapped to the standardiza-
tion category. In all other cases, however, the organization should begin
with a review of all standardization-related Best Practices, as part of a com-
prehensive assessment.
Comprehensive Assessment. After completing the Self-Assessment (or an
alternative approach to assessing the organization against Best Practices
described in the Standard) and determining which Best Practices to inves-
tigate first, the organization should proceed to gather further information
at a detailed level. This second phase of the Assessment step—the Com-
prehensive Assessment—is an evaluation of which specific Capabilities do
or do not exist in the organization, relative to each Best Practice in ques-
tion, providing a more in-depth and precise view of an organization’s cur-
rent state of maturity. To perform the Comprehensive Assessment, the user
refers to the Improvement Planning Directory to view the series of Capabil-
ities aggregating to each Best Practice in question. The user then determines
which of the identified Capabilities already exist in the organization. This
step involves studying each Capability and determining whether or not its
associated Outcomes exist and are observable in the organization as evi-
dence of the Capability in question. This evaluation is done through the use
of the Capabilities Directory, which shows the required Outcomes for each
Capability. In general, a Capability can be said to exist when all of the listed
Outcomes have been observed. Similarly, a Best Practice can be said to exist
when all its listed Capabilities exist. (See Section 6.3.3 Step Three: Plan for
Improvements for additional information on this subject.)
The Best Practices pages in the Improvement Planning Directory can serve
as a checklist or template for the Comprehensive Assessment process, Improvement Planning Directory
because the identifying numbers for the Capabilities associated with each
Best Practice are logically arranged, building from a basic Capability to
those that are dependent on previous Capabilities. The pages in this Direc-
tory provide a check-off column for the Outcomes that will have to be iden-
tified to verify the existence of each Capability.
This evaluation of Capabilities is necessarily rigorous, and allows the
organization to gain a more detailed understanding of its state of maturity
in organizational project management. This step will help the organization

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