You Can Get There From Here

     This article continues a series that explores how increased maturity can influence better project results. The series is based upon results from the Organizational Project Management Baseline Study, a worldwide benchmarking effort to understand current capabilities, trends and best practices in the realm of organizational project management.

Maturity models provide a strong appeal in helping to communicate current capabilities, and helping to make the case for improving project management effectiveness. Their primary advantage is in distilling the complexities associated with how an organization manages its projects into a simplified model that typically expresses maturity in levels, most often using a 5-level framework. A Level 1 organization is one that is completely ad hoc, lacking processes and relying upon the expertise and persistence of its project team for success. At Level 3, there is a consistent process defined within the organization that is consistently applied for all of its projects. Level 5 speaks to a mature, rigorous process discipline that defines how the organization is managed and commits to an on-going process of continuous improvement.

While the simplicity of maturity model results is useful in terms of understanding where an organization is against a defined model, this high level overview leads to questions that require a more granular understanding and a larger context. While it might be helpful to know that your organization is at level 2, or even a 2.3, what does that mean? How does that help or hinder your competitive advantage? And what should you do about it?

Where the OPM Baseline Study provides value is that it allows organizations to not only assess themselves against a model, but to understand where their results place them against other organizations. Many organizations use the study results as a form of internal benchmarking, comparing their improvement over time against an initial baseline of organization performance, or by comparing the performance and capabilities of individual business units within the same organization. In addition, the OPM Baseline Study enables direct external benchmarks. Participant organizations are able to compare their results against those of their industry, identifying where they have a competitive advantage or improvement opportunities exist. They also are able to understand their current performance relative to the study average, other organizations of similar size and structure, and against those organizations that current high-watermark in terms of assessed maturity.

The OPM Baseline Study helps organizations answer the questions that their executives are asking: Where are our current capabilities? How do we compare against the rest of the industry? What would it take to be a project management leader in our industry? What dimensions do we need to emphasize to attain our project management goals?

Without this comparative data, maturity model results simply reflect a score — but a score with more limited meaning. The value of selling maturity results and the need for improvement depends upon the degree to which an organization can make the case of why improvement is necessary and the value that improvement will bring. Without objective data that allows for direct comparisons, the ability to model the impact of improvements is driven by little more than hope and speculation.

What is important to recognize in building a business case is that simply productivity improvements within the project management function is not the goal. For most organizations, project management represents about 10-15 percent of the overall cost of individual projects. If you improve productivity of project managers by even 10 percent, you are only having a net 1 percent to 1.5 percent impact on the bottom line — hardly a claim that will win widespread support. The larger question is how improving project management can leverage benefits in the other 80-85 percent of project costs, and most importantly in the delivery of the value resulting from the projects being undertaken.

The benchmarking database that has been developed as a result of the OPM Baseline Study provides an invaluable tool in making the case for improved project practices. Developed over the past eight years with input from more than 650 organizations and 3,000 individuals, it provides useful insights into those practices that are most strongly correlated to improvements overall increases in maturity, and the degree to which making those improvements results in actual increases in project management effectiveness. The ability to model these behaviors means that a defensible business case for improving project practices becomes possible. These insights are essential in building a case for improvement for senior management — and securing executive support and commitment to improving these practices.

One Step After the Other, Repeat As Necessary
How do we improve the way we manage our projects today? While the journey of a thousand miles may begin with a single step, knowing the direction in which to make that step is the difference between making progress and going nowhere fast. One of the greatest challenges that those charged with developing or improvement an organization’s project management capabilities is in knowing where to start, and what steps to take that will have the greatest impact.

For organizations that are early in their improvement process, there may be low-hanging fruit that it seems most natural to bite off first. Providing training courses, the development of methodologies and the provision of software tools and templates represent some of the most common starting points for most organizations. While at a high-level these activities may be appropriate and relevant, how do these improvements hold up at a detailed level? Are we building in the right level of complexity and rigor, or too much? Do the practices and tools make sense for us as an organization, and do they reflect our culture and the types of projects that we manage?

An equally relevant question, once the low hanging fruit has been picked, is where do we go from there? What are the next improvement steps that make sense once the initial framework and processes are in place? Are we now in a cycle of incremental improvement, or are their significant improvements that are still possible if only we know what capabilities to introduce?
For both the organization that is starting out and the one that has been working to improve its capabilities for a long time, having objective information to answer these questions can be invaluable. The OPM Baseline Study has been used by numerous organizations to ask exactly these questions, and more. Individual organizations are able to assess and evaluate their current capabilities and compare them against other organizations — whether they are in the same industry, facing similar challenges or simply reflecting the overall best-in-class practices today.

By understanding where we are and where we are trying to go, it is possible to identify those steps that will have the greatest impact in attaining our goals. Without a firm direction established, it is difficult to set a course or guide improvement. For any organization, the ability to improve depends upon knowing what our goals and objectives for ourselves are, and the steps we need to take to get there from our current position. The advantage of the OPM Baseline Study and its underlying maturity model is that it doesn’t assume that there is one single outcome or destination for project management improvement — it allows each organization to define its own.

The ability to tailor individual improvement plan objectives is fundamental to ensuring that project management is a core competency or competitive advantage. Simply borrowing or adapting the practices of other organizations will not necessarily yield the results an organization is seeking, or even ones that are relevant. By being specific about where the organization is today and where it needs to go, a much more focused plan for improvement is possible.

An assessment should allow organizations to identify where they are, and to model specifically where they would like to be. It should provide a vocabulary by which that vision can be articulated, literally enabling an organization to draw a ‘line in the sand’ that reflects what the future organization should look like once its goals have been realized. And finally, it should allow a means of measuring progress against that goal, evaluating how the organization moves and evolves from its initial baseline to its targeted future capabilities.

The OPM Baseline benchmarking effort supports this improvement planning by identifying those practices that are drivers of change – those that most strongly correlate with and therefore influence the development of across the board improvement. By being able to identify those practices that have the greatest impact, improvement plans can be more focused and tailored. As a result, the improvement activities we undertake are more efficient in creating capabilities and guiding behaviors that reflect how we want to manage our projects in the future.

http://www.projectsatwork.com/content/articles/229290.cfm