Page 71 - Organizational Project Management

Appendix B—Evolution of the OPM3 Standard

with carrying out the countless tasks required to move the project forward.
Throughout the life cycle of the project, many volunteers held Guidance
Team positions. For a listing of those volunteers who were on the Guidance
Team at the close of the project, refer to Appendix C.
In October 1999, Terry Cooke-Davies, then co-lead of the Research Team,
became deputy to Program Manager, John Schlichter. Cooke-Davies held
this deputy position until July 2001.

B.2 DEVELOPMENT CHALLENGES

The OPM3 Guidance Team decided to conduct a survey in Spring 2000 to
find out the current state of organizational project management in busi-
ness, and to identify possible problem areas, as well as Best Practices.
The strategy, up to this point in Q1 2000, had reflected largely a classic
"waterfall" development approach: initial research was to feed into design,
design into build and test, and so on. But, there were difficulties associated
with the analysis of the qualitative research, and PMI asked the team to do
everything possible to accelerate the project timetable.
The OPM3 Guidance Team modified its strategy in two ways: to move
away from the "waterfall" development model towards a strategy that aligns
more to "rapid prototype development," and to involve members of the
project management profession as "subject matter experts" more closely
in both the research and design of the Model.

B.3 IDENTIFYING BEST PRACTICES
The team was faced with the need to find alternative methods for identi-
fying organizational project management best practices, and agreed to uti-
lize a brainstorming technique to facilitate the collection of input from
individuals in a group, in such a way that no single person could dominate
the process. This process was expanded to include members of the PMI
Seminars and Symposium Standards Open Working Session in September
2000.
In a first round of brainstorming, participants were invited to suggest
"elements" that constituted maturity in organizational project management.
Definitions for maturity were developed. This resulted in approximately
eighty suggested elements, which were then consolidated into fifty-nine to
reduce overlap and duplication.
In a second round, approximately 200 OPM3 volunteers were invited to
review the elements and evaluate them against three criteria:
■ Do they contribute to an organization's project management maturity?
■ Can an organization implement them directly, without prerequisites?
■ Are they conducive to performance criteria to measure effectiveness of
implementation?
The process resulted in the conclusion that the elements reviewed in the
second round comprised a good starting point for the designing of a first
iteration of the new Model.
Up to this point, each element-or Best Practice, as they were later
renamed-was written as a complex statement containing multiple ideas.

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