What is project management maturity and how to measure it at your company?

What is project management maturity and how to measure it at your company? Just as every person develops and matures over the years, the same is true for business and its various areas – provided, of course, that it is well managed. Every process taking place in a company should be constantly improved. You should strive to develop certain standards that will facilitate the realization of predetermined goals. One of the areas to which this principle applies is project management. Read on.

Project management maturity – table of contents:

1. What is project management maturity?
2. From immaturity to maturity
3. How to measure project management maturity
4. Summary

What is project management maturity?

Project management maturity is the ability to manage projects. This ability should change over time – companies want to achieve the greatest possible degree of project management maturity to see such results as:

• more efficient use of available resources,
• avoiding previous mistakes thanks to the experience gathered earlier,
• more efficient organization,
• better results of the carried out activities.

In order to get the benefits outlined above, companies should examine their project management maturity and consider what they can do to ensure growth in this area.

From immaturity to maturity

Companies that are completely immature, make the same mistakes over and over again, and achieve success only with individual projects due to the commitment of the people taking care of them. In this type of organization there is no distinction between project management and operational management.

Mature companies, in turn, implement activities through projects tailored to the needs of the organization and managed in the right way. In such companies, you can see, among other things, a full understanding of what a project is, the division of roles in the team or the use of project management methodologies.

It is worth keeping in mind that each company – due to their various goals, capabilities or basic needs, will have a different degree of project management maturity and strive to achieve different results in this regard. What will matter in the first place is whether project management is the main way of doing business (as in the case of IT companies putting up online stores or NGOs, for example), or whether it is just an occasionally used way of achieving goals.

How to measure project management maturity

To measure project management maturity, models developed specifically for this purpose are used. The most popular of these is the Project Management Maturity Model (abbreviated as PMMM), which derives from a model developed by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University in 1987. There are five levels of maturity included in the PM Solutions Project Management Maturity Model:

1. Initial process – lack of processes and documentation to work together on the project, ad hoc tasks, lack of ways to measure success,
2. Structured process and standards – different project management methods are used in the organization, standardization at the level of specific teams, project success dependent on the team,
3. Organizational standards and institutionalized process – a standardized way of managing projects across the organization, using metrics, implementing new processes when necessary,
4. Managed process – transparent project management processes, the use of documentation, planning how to implement future projects using metrics (analysis of results),
5. Optimizing process –improving project management activities, creating strategic plans for the future, maintaining efficiency.

You can also use other project management maturity models such as:

• Prince 2 Maturity Model,
• OGC Project Management Maturity Model,
• The European Foundation for Quality Management Excellence Model (EFQM),
• PM Solutions Project Management Maturity Model.

Summary

Project management maturity is not something that you gain immediately, but after many years of practical experience, according to the levels outlined above. Special project management software (such as Fimbee, for example) can be helpful in building it and improve the efficiency of the processes taking place.

Read also: How can the project management system help with event marketing?

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