EPM/OPM Maturity and the PMO

In previous article, I talked about Organizational Project Management Excellence, and how a functional unit of PMO can contribute by enabling successes that can help achieve organizational goals. Here, let's discuss briefly about the Enterprise/Organizational project management maturity itself. We see that generally the OPM maturity is referred and compared on the timescale within the same organization or cluster of them as part of the parent organization. What this means is that often, OPM maturity is perceived as quite personal to a business entity. This is because organizational fabric is made up of permanent, semi-permanent and variable factors and underlying parameters that has a combined effect on project management performance at any given point in time. Note that the maturity assessment can't practically be done on a daily basis, nor it can be done on a spectrum of infinite maturity levels. Needless to say that maturity assessment traditionally is performed with immaturity of it's own process that has some degree of inaccuracy and delays associated.

The Cycle:

It is a known fact that OPM maturity improvement doesn't have a permanent effect and every couple of years more often than not, the maturity refresh, uplift, improvement or a recovery effort is required for keeping the maturity relevant. The duration depends on a large number of known internal or external factors as well as the factors triggered by the organization's own maturity, life-cycle, leadership and other dynamics that can lead to an eroding effect on OPM efficiency and maturity. While the community is aware of the common causes and within organizational context, the executive attention gets drawn to the OPM improvement needs for strategic reasons, problem is that though workarounds applied, a permanent fix is beyond not only their radar, but are not part of most available models. And because they are considered for the maturity improvement efforts, the OPM maturity goes through these cycles inevitably. Unfortunate are those cases when, PMO is setup, roadmap established, but milestones and underlying goals failed, time passed to find out that PMO is just a side line advisory group that ends up running in minimum capacity without any real influence on ongoing or future priorities.

Real-time Maturity Assessment:

There were times when absence of technological leverage didn't practically allow to have the maturity assessment done in real time. And right from the early stages the OPM maturity assessment is done occasionally and on need bases. This is one of the critical problems and adds to the delay of underlying maturity issues and in fact is a major reason behind the PMO refresh cycles. Real-time maturity assessments should be performed to avoid letting the maturity degrade silently and leave piles of impact behind on organizational goals. In part, this is also calling for a culture change that is best suited for the organizational needs.

The Growth and the OPM Maturity Levels:

In an organization, the people, policies, processes, systems, market type, conditions and the environmental factors create a possibility to attain an ideal strategic target. High performance organizations attain growth that is closer compared to those which are not. More projectized the organization is the more OPM maturity affects such attained growth and the resulting offset to the potential target. The organizational and the OPM maturity always have mutual influence cycles, where in early stages of OPM maturity uplift, the former drives the later and in then the later supports the former. When OPM performance improves and reaches optimal, delivering record results historically, it plateaus. This could well be the likely outcome on roadmap, awaiting further enablers yet to be tuned, which once done, further improvement step-up will follow. PMO using it's own share of influence, can go far beyond just the OPM, and well into other streams, technology, strategic or tactical elements, integrated deficiencies etc.. It is common trend in PMO world to study lessons learned for further improvement, but note that these are documented from reactive cues and most of them are visible. Off course, they should be the ones that directly help improvise OPM maturity in the form of 'kaizen'. PMO however, should go beyond those direct indicators and further mature OPM. This needs strategic capability building, access to organizational champions, and deep understanding of cause and effect relationships so that the indirect indicators can be prioritized accordingly for quick and significant gains first. Overall maturity uplift should follow small flattened logistic growth followed by saturation, leading to another such cycle. Yes, you got it right, it's an ongoing effort of modeling OPM into a high growth state that potentially cross the point of no/rare return (with sufficient barriers in place).

This was brief summary of OPM maturity and the PMO. Hopefully it helps the community. I have tried to avoid common (AI too) knowledge assuming, basics are known by most in PMO world. Next I will share my experiences of PMO internals. Feel free to share your experiences.