Building Project Management Maturity

In this post, we’ll look at a company that found itself at a competitive disadvantage because of their project management performance and the steps they took to improve their performance and capability.

The Situation

This telecommunications company found itself in the crosshairs of a competitor’s advertising campaign, ranking them at the bottom in terms of project management performance and customer satisfaction based on an independent study. Senior management challenged the Enterprise Project Management Office (EPMO) to clean up their project management and customer satisfaction performance to the point where it would no longer be a competitive disadvantage.

The Goal

The EPMO quickly launched an initiative to turn their performance around, leveraging the expertise of an independent consulting firm with relevant experience building project management capability. The initiative had four objectives:

  1. Establish a current capability baseline that would be used to confirm (or disprove) the competitor’s claims
  2. Use industry standard practices and measures
  3. Develop an action plan to improve project performance and customer satisfaction
  4. Review industry project maturity benchmarks to validate and verify recommendations

The Project

The project’s challenge was to upgrade the performance of some sixty staff and contract project managers. To that end, the project leveraged the following industry models to assess maturity and identify and deliver project management improvements:

  1. The SEI's five evolutionary maturity levels from CMMI
  2. The nine knowledge areas in the PMI's A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK)
  3. The Project Pre-Check Decision Framework, a best practice based framework, used by the consulting firm to assess organizational project management maturity

The assessment involved the following activities:

  1. Document Review – to baseline the current environment through a review of process and practice documentation
  2. PM Interviews – to baseline the current attitudes and beliefs through project management interviews
  3. Project Reviews – to baseline the actual compliance to in-place processes and practices through project documentation review
  4. Web Survey – to solicit feedback from all project managers not included in direct interviews
  5. PMM Assessment, Gaps and Recommendations
  6. Review findings against an industry project maturity benchmark to validate and verify recommendations