OPM3 As A Tool Of Revenge

 

First, A Little History

I think the proliferation of capability maturity models (CMMs) owe their popularity to Carnegie Melon University’s Software Engineering Institute (SEI), which performed a study on how software companies mature in their ability to successfully produce computer programs. The analysis became part of the book Managing the Software Process by Watts Humphrey[i], published in 1993, that divided software engineering firms into five levels:

• Level 1 (“Initial”), where everybody is basically doing their own thing (or nothing) with respect to the sought-after capability,
• Level 2 (“Repeatable”), which is very basic but standardized, so the entire organization is performing at the same level of expertise,
• Level 3 (“Defined”), is the Level where, if the heroes who got the organization to this point are hit by the proverbial beer truck, the organization’s capability level doesn’t decline because there are sufficient procedures and training in-place to perpetuate that level of expertise,
• Level 4 (“Managed”) organizations are good enough to export their expertise to others organizations, and
• Level 5 (“Optimized”) organizations are so good at what they do that they regularly discover solutions to long-standing problems.

Have We Seen This Before?

I was struck on how similar these “Levels” were to Tuckman’s stages of group development[ii], published in 1965, specifically that project teams go through a four-stage progression, of Forming – Storming – Norming – and Performing. If the SEI model assumes the teams have already formed – they did, after all, examine existing organizations – then Level 1 equals Storming, Levels 2 and 3 represent Norming, and Levels 4 and 5 are marked by their superior performance. If we’re talking about assessing organizations by the performance of their personnel resources by categories or Levels, then the two structures, in my opinion, are remarkably similar. SEI simply adds more detail. Don’t misunderstand – I’m not accusing anybody of plagiarism, or idea-lifting. It’s just that the practice of defining categories of organizations by certain criterion (“There are two kinds of people – those who divide people in to two categories, and those that don’t”) and then using those criterion as a measuring standard isn’t new.

If this is the case, then consider some of the implications. Currently, most college-level business schools teach that the point of all management is to “maximize shareholder wealth.” Agree or disagree with me that this is clearly silly, there can be no valid argument that this approach is against the Project Management raison d’etre, which is to manage work in such a way as to satisfy the customers’ expectations/parameters of scope, cost, and schedule. But that never stopped the asset management crowd from trying to tell the PM aficionados how to do their jobs, based on the analysis they derive from data in the general ledger. There are actually several books on how to calculate the return on investment (ROI), a favorite analysis technique of the general ledger geeks, on setting up a Project Management Office. For generations the asset managers’ tools have been intruding into project management space, where they most certainly do not belong.

Take That, Finance and Accounting!

But along come the Organizational Project Management Maturity Model. And what does it do? It essentially points out that corporations that have many projects feeding into several programs becoming part of a portfolio of work can have optimal (and, by extension, sub-optimal) organizational structures. The step-by-step ideological payback follows this path:

• Organizations are made up of resources.
• Resource management is not Project Management.
• PM, however, provides the metric by which organizations succeed or fail in portfolio management space.
• Basically, we PM types have turned the tables on the Asset Managers, by redefining (correctly) how organizations achieve success (or are viewed as failures), and on our terms.

This form of epistemological payback was a while in coming, but it’s said that revenge is a dish best served cold.

Lagniappe

My next book is coming out later this month. It’s entitled The Unavoidable Hierarchy; Who’s Who In Your Organization, And Why, and it’s available here. It’s about how people tend to fall into specific roles, or ranks, in the organizations in which they participate, and an analysis of the tactics used to advance within those hierarchies. My former PMNetwork columnist colleagues Neal Whitten and Bud Baker both gave great reviews of the manuscript, leading me to believe it might be worth its price (at least on Kindle!).

[i] Capability Maturity Model. (2016, August 28). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 16:55, September 5, 2016, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Capability_Maturity_Model&oldid=736597555

[ii] Tuckman's stages of group development. (2016, July 22). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 17:08, September 5, 2016, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tuckman%27s_stages_of_group_development&oldid=731055786