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Appendix B—Evolution of the OPM3 Standard

need for OPM3 beta testers. Everyone who expressed interest in the testing
was invited to work with the team to plan the testing effort.

B.6 PROCESS MODEL
Upon producing the majority of Capabilities and Outcomes by third quarter
2001, the Guidance Team recognized a new problem. Led by Ade
Lewandowski, the Process Model Team realized that all of the incremental
Capabilities that had been articulated did not "tell the story" of how an orga-
nization achieves organizational strategies through projects. It was also
unclear how to organize the content of the Model in a useful format that
makes sense and that people can relate to. To address these problems, in
the third quarter of 2001, the team began to discuss the development of a
process model. PMI indicated support of this idea. While the decision to
pursue a process model would make developing OPM3 more complex, all
agreed that it would make the Standard more useful. There was wide dis-
cussion, and the team ultimately decided to take this approach. In a sub-
sequent survey, a majority of respondents confirmed that a process model
was a valid and desirable approach to development of OPM3….later to be
coined the OPM3 Construct.
A number of components were developed by the Integration and Process
Model Teams during 2002 that all came together to form the OPM3 Process
Construct. In addition to the Best Practice work mentioned earlier, new
Capabilities were developed to address the four process improvement stages
of standardize, measure, control, and continuously improve, for any
process. After being reviewed and validated, these Capabilities were later
extended to each of the processes within each organizational project man-
agement domain (Project, Program, and Portfolio). During the Guidance
Team's next face-to-face meeting in October 2002, it was decided that a
Best Practice would be created for the achievement of each stage of process
improvement, and for each process in each domain, resulting in 468 addi-
tional Best Practices. This method provided complete coverage of the orga-
nizational project management process for assessments and improvement
planning.
These Best Practices and Capabilities were integrated with the existing
ones, and dependencies between the Capabilities were identified and incor-
porated into the Model. Finally, all the Best Practices and Capabilities were
mapped to the appropriate process improvement stage and organizational
project management domain.
(In subsequent months, through a series of quality review processes, PMI
trimmed a number of Best Practices from the Model to eliminate ambiguous
or overlapping items, resulting in the final number of 597 Best Practices.)
At its next face-to-face meeting in late 2002, the Guidance Team adopted
an updated plan and schedule. They also developed the initial Concept of
Model Operation- describing how a user would travel through OPM3-and
discussed the Process Model. They agreed that the Process Model should
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have a direct link to the PMBOK Guide, as it was clear the market wanted
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such a link. As a result, the team agreed to use the PMBOK Guide's Initi-
ating, Planning, Executing, Controlling, and Closing (IPECC) Process Group
framework. The team invited PMI to comment on this framework and PMI

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