Maturity matters

Maturity is an obvious choice for companies looking to increase their ROI in project management, but they need to carefully examine what it takes to get where they want to go.

maturity matters

by Malcolm Wheatley

few would argue that project management maturity isn't worth pursuing. Maturity does indeed matter, leading to fewer project failures and overruns, better governance and more efficient resource allocation.

Consultancy power player PricewaterhouseCoopers took on the issue of ROI in a 2004 survey of 200 respondents in 30 countries around the globe. The survey posed the question: “Does greater organizational project management maturity actually correlate with improved project management performance?” The answer? A resounding “yes.”

The survey concluded the greater an organization's project management maturity, the greater the positive impact on overall project performance. And that wasn't just on one project, but on the overall portfolio of projects.

What's more, it seemed project management maturity could well be the missing link in explaining why projects go wrong. PricewaterhouseCoopers found project failures are often a consequence of organizational factors, such as culture, corporate attitudes toward improvement and quality, and overall approach to governance—over which individual project managers have little influence. By ensuring the organizational environment in which projects are executed has an appropriate maturity, the report said, the risk of failure is reduced.

With so much presumably to gain, the question then comes down to whether every organization should be working for maximum maturity.

Companies need to be very clear about how far—and why—they want to progress in a given direction, says Suhail Iqbal, PMP, CEO of SysComp International, a project management consultancy in Islamabad, Pakistan.

“Organizations are like living organisms. Some are relatively small, and some are very large. Their maturity needs will vary, and there isn't a ‘one size fits all’ optimum level of maturity that's appropriate for every organization,” he warns. “For some organizations, progress beyond a given point may be pointless.”

They should still purse maturity, but focus on what best suits their own needs.

“At the very highest levels of maturity, the practices in place may have an element of gold-plating,” says Alan Harpham, chairman of APM Group, a project and program management certification and accreditation firm in High Wycombe, England. “You have to be pragmatic about what degree of maturity is actually required.”

Of course, an organization first needs to figure out just how mature it is. Maturity models, including PMI’s Organizational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3^®), can provide a useful gauge—and show where project management practices are falling down.

Even so, it's important not to regard maturity models as some kind of silver bullet, warns Harold Kerzner, Ph.D., senior executive director at New York, N.Y., USA-based International Institute for Learning, a project management training company.

“Formal models can be invaluable—provided the model can be customized to fit the company and its needs, rather than expecting the company to change to fit the model,” he says.

The U.K.’s Pension Protection Fund is making a concerted push toward maturity, but it also knows there is more work to do. Facing increasing public clamor over the growing number of corporate insolvencies leaving employee pension schemes high and dry, the British government created the fund in 2004. The group became operational on 6 April 2005—and just days later found itself facing its first test, the high-profile collapse of British car manufacturer MG Rover, which declared itself bankrupt.

With only a few months of experience, staff members were responsible for developing new practices to ensure the smooth transition of pension schemes to the fund—something that had never been attempted before in the United Kingdom. By November, as the caseload mounted, senior managers were keen to establish systems and procedures to ensure the fledgling organization was working efficiently.

So the fund created a program management office, tasked not only with overseeing all the projects in place within the fund, but also establishing a standard framework of project management best practices.

As head of organizational effectiveness, Jeff Wickett says his role was to champion project management across the organization and act as program manager for mission-critical programs.

The introduction of the program management office marked a steep change in the maturity of the practice of project management within the organization.

As a public yet independent body, the fund elected to follow the project management guidelines laid down in PRINCE2 and the Office of Government Commerce's Managing Successful Programmes. “We have developed our methodology to be proportionate to the level and type of change activity undertaken by the fund while retaining the valuable best practice contained in [the guidelines],” Mr. Wickett says.

The Pension Protection Fund has achieved a level 3 accreditation against the Office of Government Commerce Portfolio, Programme and Project Management Maturity Model. Clearly impressive, but Mr. Wickett says the fund's approach to project and program management is regularly reviewed for continuous improvement to ensure the organization will mature.

Even after an organization accepts the merits of maturity, it faces many obstacles along the way.

Civil engineer Anthony Morgan, a London, Englandbased partner advising on capital projects consulting and dispute resolution at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, points the finger at a combination of three factors:

At the very highest levels of maturity, the practices in place may have an element of gold-plating. You have to be pragmatic about what degree of maturity is actually required.

—Alan Harpham, APM Group, High Wycombe, England

1. Lack of investment in people skills. Companies need employees who have not just project management abilities, but valuable interpersonal skills such as leadership, motivation and listening.

2. Failure to learn from past performance. “It's surprising how many companies don't go back and say, ‘How did it go?’” Mr. Morgan says.

3. Shortage of funds devoted to IT software and systems. “Collecting and reporting data is a key part of project management,” he says. “Skimping on it is dangerous.”

Ted Kempf, Des Moines, Iowa, USA-based senior director of product marketing for Oracle Corp.’s project management application, agrees with the IT assessment. But he sees another couple of barriers that can prevent organizations from improving their maturity.

“You've got to have executive buy-in at the top,” he says. “You're talking about changing fundamental aspects of how things are done within the business—and you need to have appropriate support and leadership in place for that.”

Companies must also come in armed with superior change management skills, Mr. Kempf adds. “Acknowledging that your organization isn't perfect is one thing—actually achieving an improvement is quite another.” PM

Malcolm Wheatley is a U.K.-based freelance writer who writes for CIO and Manufacturing Business Technology.

PM NETWORK | JULY 2007 | WWW.PMI.ORG