Project Management Central

- Mark Price Perry's book, 'Business Driven PMO Setup' provides some good discussion on maturity.
- Peter Taylor and Ray Mead summarize several approaches in the appendix of their book, 'Delivering Successful PMOs'.
- William Dow emphasizes Kerzner's PMM model in his book, 'The PMO Lifecycle'.

At my last couple of employers, I've done something similar to the PMO Value Ring, where I work with leaders to establish what they value, related to specific maturity levels, and identify targets in each area.

With this approach, and any other maturity model, it is my opinion that the goal should NOT be to achieve Level 5 in all things. Maybe it's a matter of culture, maybe cost, or time and effort. Identify the level it makes sense to achieve, and then identify what you can achieve, this year, in the context of your daily work. Measure and report on progress, adjusting as needed. Do it again, next year, because company priorities may have changed.

There are some areas where we're at a Level 1 or 2 and are not likely to make any effort to go beyond that. And that's perfectly acceptable to my leadership.

The justification for this approach comes from several sources, but PMI provides good insight into this:

https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/pmos-...%20two%20years.

According to the article, the average lifespan of a PMO is 2 years. It argues that if your PMO is just delivering projects in scope, on time, and under budget it will fail. IMO, part of the problem is that most companies don't really know, or take the time, to understand what they need.

As part of my DA journey, I've just started reading 'From PMO to VMO' by Augustine, Cuellar, and Scheere. I can't say much about it, yet (I really JUST started reading it), but I like the concept and think that asking "How well is the PMO delivering value?" is a better question than "How mature is our PMO?"