The Professional Project Manager

In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, organizational success is not just about meeting targets—it's about excelling in project, program, and portfolio management (P3M). A comprehensive understanding of your organization’s P3M maturity can be a game-changer. This is where a Portfolio, Programme, and Project Management Maturity Model (P3M3^®) assessment becomes invaluable. I have personally seen (and assisted) organisations go from low performing to high performing by completing a P3M3^® assessment and following the prioritized improvement recommendations that are central to it.

The Transformative Impact of P3M3^® Assessments

A P3M3^® assessment provides a structured framework to understand, evaluate, and enhance your organization's project management capabilities. The insights gained from this assessment are pivotal in:

1. Identifying Improvement Areas: Uncover hidden inefficiencies and areas needing refinement in your organization's project management processes.
2. Focussing on Existing Strengths: The assessment is not a punitive exercise but instead seeks to uncover what is working well and make sure you do more of this.
3. Enhancing Decision-Making: Equip your leadership with the data they need to make informed decisions, elevating the effectiveness of governance and resource allocation.
4. Boosting Project Success Rates: Ultimately, the purpose of the P3M3^® assessment is to improve the predictability and performance of your projects, leading to more consistent success (however you define it) and assisting your organisation achieve its strategic goals.

Why Opt for a Virtual P3M3^® Assessment?

In the digital age, virtual assessments have proven to be not only feasible but highly efficient. Conducting a P3M3^® assessment virtually offers several compelling advantages:

• Flexibility and Convenience: Adjust the assessment schedule to suit your organization's busy calendar, without the need for physical meetings. The data and evidence reviews, the workshops and interviews, and presentations involved in the assessment can be completed virtually so you can engage a certified P3M3^® Assessor from anywhere in the world.
• Cost-Effectiveness: The virtual option also saves on travel and accommodation expenses typically associated with in-person assessments.
• Rapid Implementation: By choosing a virtual option you get quicker assessment kick-off, setup and completion which mean faster access to valuable insights.

Achieving a high level of P3M maturity is a testament to an organization’s commitment to excellence. It’s a badge of honor, showcasing a culture that values continuous improvement and professional growth. By engaging in a P3M3^® assessment, you’re not just contributing to the success of your projects; you're uplifting the entire organization. This commitment reflects your dedication to excellence, a quality that resonates across all levels of the organization.

While the idea of conducting a P3M3^® assessment is appealing, the expertise required to do so effectively is crucial. Seeking a certified, authorised, knowledgeable and experienced professional to guide you through the process can make a significant difference. AXELOS makes a great deal of effort to ensure only the best organisations can become an AXELOS Consulting partner (ACP), and only people trained and certified can be a Certified P3M3^® Assessor. An expert with a nuanced understanding of virtual assessments can tailor the process to your organization's unique needs, ensuring that the results are both relevant and actionable.

In considering your options for a P3M3^® assessment facilitator, it's beneficial to select someone who is not just a certified and authorised assessor, but someone with a broad range of experience so that the prioritized recommendations they provide for improvement are based on what actually works and not just theory. An individual who combines profound knowledge with a flexible, virtual-first approach can provide a seamless and effective assessment experience.

Embarking on a P3M3^® assessment journey is a strategic step towards organizational maturity and success. By opting for a virtual assessment, you embrace innovation and efficiency, positioning your organization to thrive in a competitive business environment. Remember, the right expertise can turn this journey into a transformative experience, paving the way for sustained excellence and pride in your organizational achievements.

Find out more about the P3M3^® assessment at https://www.axelos.com/for-organizations/p3m3

And let me know if you have any questions, always happy to chat.

Sean Whitaker

[email protected]

And yes, in terms of full disclosure I am a certified P3M3 assessor and my company is a Authorized Consulting Partner (ACP) but this isn't a pitch for work. Its a genuine piece of advice to help you and your organisation improve your portfolio, programme, and project management quickly with a proven, effective, and cost efficient method for doing so.

As a consultant who works with organizations around the globe, I get to see many forms of a PMO and I get to see what works and what doesn’t.  A well thought out and value adding PMO can add measurable strategic and operational value to any organisation regardless of its size or maturity. Getting the right PMO for your organization can be a challenge and I want to share with you some thoughts and observations on what exactly a PMO can be. Hopefully from these thoughts you can take some tips on what your PMO should be.

Let’s start with what do the letters “PMO” stand for? Well the “P” can stand for Portfolio, Programme or Project. The “M” and the “O” generally stand for Management Office. You can add an “E”, for Enterprise, in the front to get an EPMO to indicate it stretches across the entire organization. You can have individual PMO’s that answer into an EPMO. It can even not be called a PMO at all, and there are many other names it can go by. You can call it what you want as long as the name is an accurate representation of what the function actually does.

Answering the question about what a PMO can be takes a bit more time. It is not a single standard format you can apply to your organization which makes it a little hard to define appropriately. The easiest why I have found to describe, at a high level, what a PMO is, is that it should be the center of excellence, whatever that means, for professional project management in your organisation to support the current and future portfolio, program and project management aspirations of the organisation. That is a long winded way of saying that your PMO should support what you currently do but also take you into the future and a better, more mature state.

At one end of the spectrum I have seen a very low maturity organization have a ‘PMO’ that was as small as a few ring binders with templates in it that were regularly updated. At the other end of the spectrum I have worked with large and complex PMO’s which can be a fully separate and resourced unit that does full portfolio management, strategic alignment, governance, project selection & reporting, and also employs, deploys, & trains all the project management personnel. Somewhere between these two extremes is the PMO that is right for you and your organization.

Here is a list of functions that a PMO might consider:

• Governance and sponsorship
• Developing standards, methodologies, processes, tools and templates
• Maturity improvement
• Strategic alignment
• Project selection
• Full control and reporting of all initiatives
• Assurance
• Benefits management at all levels and at all stages
• Programme management
• Allocation of project management resources
• Recruitment of project managers
• Training and development of project managers

What have I missed?

These are the types of things to consider when thinking about introducing or upgrading a PMO:

1. Maturity of your organization – a low maturity organization may want a PMO that helps it increase in maturity in specific ways, while a high maturity organization will want a PMO that supports and maintains its high level of maturity.
2. Size of your organization – larger organizations generally need a larger and better resourced PMO
3. Complexity of the work that you do – the more complex the work that you do the more complex the PMO will need to be to support your efforts
4. C-Level understanding and support – without full support from senior and executive management your PMO will never be considered a full-time part of the organisation.

Unfortunately, the research tells us that there are many threats to a PMO and its success. These include the following:

1. Making a PMO a bureaucracy
2. Not proving the value a PMO brings to the organization. The PMO, whatever its form and name, must deliver real value to the organisation, and not be afraid to tell everyone how good they are. I’ve seen great PMO’s fail because they kept their success to themselves
3. Lack of senior management support
4. Tough financial times – it seems that when finances get tight for an organization the first thing to go is the PMO
5. Trying to be everything to everyone – focus on what you do well, and just do that
6. Being under resourced and overworked and letting everyone down
7. Looking backwards at what you have accomplished and not looking forward to the value you have yet to create
8. Assuming a PMO is static – a PMO should change with the organisations needs. If your PMO is the same as it was 2 years its probably out of date.

Just a reminder, this is just a high level introduction to the PMO. There has been plenty of research done on the topic and if you are academically minded you can easily find some serous pieces of research out there on the topic. There are also many people more on projectmanagement.com who I know would love to share their experiences, both bad and good. So don’t be afraid to reach out and find out as much as you can before deciding on what sort of PMO is right for you.

In the same way that project management practitioners can be described as beginner, intermediate or advanced, organizations can also be described as having low, medium, or high levels of project management. These levels of project management reflect the level of organizational project management maturity (OPMM).  Knowing the level of OPMM your organisation is currently at, and also knowing where it should be is essential to help you reach your organisational goals and strategy through better delivery of portfolios, programmes, and projects.

An OPMM assessment will look at all aspects of the way you run portfolios, programmes and projects within the organisation including:

• Organisational Governance
• Management controls
•  
• Finance and cost estimating
• Planning and Execution
• Scheduling and time estimating
• Stakeholder management and communications
•  
• Lessons learned and information management
•  
• Risk management
• Quality management
• Practitioner capability development

A good assessment will look at all the processes and practices you have, evidence of them being used (or not), and also interview users and key stakeholders either in a workshop or face to face interviews. Once the evidence gathering is completed they can provide scores for individual business units, an organisational score (usually 0-5), benchmarking against others in the industry and a set of prioritized (and achievable) recommendations to move you towards your goal.

A good OPMM assessment provides a benchmark for your future efforts. It lets you know that you are progressing in the right areas. Without it you simply don’t know how well you are doing with your improvement efforts. It’s a good idea to commit to regular OPMM assessments every 18-24 months to check how you are progressing, and to reprioritize recommendations.

Don’t assume that all organizations must be at the top level of maturity, it’s important to consider that the level of OPMM that is desirable for any organisation is directly related to the size, cost, length, complexity and industry of the projects being undertaken. Organizations undertaking highly complex, long term, expensive projects should aim to have a higher level of project management maturity, while organizations and small businesses routinely undertaking short, low cost, low complexity projects may be perfectly suited to a lesser level of project management maturity.

Using an external consultant to assess your level of project management maturity and make recommendations has a number of benefits:

• A good consultant will make sure that your recommendations are achievable, affordable and appropriate.
• You get access to their wider experience with many organisations and their insights into best practice
• The report will be independent and objective

There are several good commercial models available in the market and the benefit of using one of these is that it allows you to more easily benchmark your organisation against others in their database.

I am experienced in using the P3M3, OPM3, HSI 4Q model and bespoke OPMM assessment models and if you have any questions about any aspect of organizational project management maturity please do not hesitate to contact me.

If you have any questions, comments or feedback please feel free to email me.

Have you ever played the game of dominos? I did many years ago and I was never very good at it. If you remember the game, it involves trying to place your dominoes in some sort of order to block and beat your opponent. The other great thing you can do with dominoes is balance them on their edge, line them up, push the first one over and watch the cascading effect as one falling domino causing the next to fall. If one domino fails to fall or is missing, then then no other dominoes will fall. There are some great world records set for this and if you have time take a look online.

Anyway, the point of that preamble is to rather clumsily introduce the idea of connected, interconnected and dependent events. It’s a particularly important concept when looking at achieving organizational strategy. Achieving strategic success is not simply a matter of defining the strategy and then sitting back and watching it happen.  A series of interconnected events needs to occur to ensure that strategic success occurs. In fact, there are many variables that contribute to strategic success but for the purpose of clarity and brevity I am going to focus on the link between strategic success and organizational project management capability.

Organizational project management capability refers to what practices and processes the organization has to assist with successful portfolio, program and project management. The individual components of organization project management capability are many and varied, and listing them all would take up the rest of this blog but it does include the following elements:

• Portfolio management techniques for selecting and prioritizing the right projects.
• Organization wide support for project management – a move to Total Project Management (TPM) which is like the concept of Total Quality Management (TQM).
• The right PMO for the organization right now
• A talent management strategy for assessing and improving individual practitioner capability
• An organizational project management methodology
• Individual tailored project management methodologies including tools techniques and templates

If you view achieving strategy as the final domino to fall you must ensure that all the parts of appropriate organizational project management are in place and playing their part. They must be in place and ‘fall’ first in order to achieve your strategic objectives.

What this means is that you need to begin to view organizational project management capability as a key management tool for achieving strategic initiatives. You need to see the interconnected relationship between strategy and project management. You need to foster and strengthen the links between C level executives setting the strategy and practitioners at all levels charged with delivering the projects which deliver that strategy.

So, take some time to make those clear links between individual elements of your organizational strategy and the specific parts of organizational project management capability that will contribute to delivering them. Focus on the weak areas of each and my final tip is to begin the process by only choosing those projects that align with and deliver organizational strategy.