Has your Organization levelled up to LEVEL 4 in Organizational Project Management Maturity?

How can you assess your Organization and its Project Management Maturity? Why is it important?

Your project management health is a key indicator of a company’s potential and whether or not it is a great place to work and advance your career.

Storyboard PM wants to use Practical Principles of Project Management to help you get to a Level 5 in both your Organizational and Project Management Maturity, so your career/business/organizational development goes more smoothly through better change management initiatives and better project execution and improvement.

Here’s our overview of Level 4 Project Management Maturity:

4) Measured

* Processes have KPIs. Projects measure outcomes against expectations.

* All projects have scoreboards.

* Lessons Learned get documented and knowledge managed.

* People enjoy working together (processes are smooth and feedback is freely given because it is well-received.).

Now we are getting somewhere. If your project management successes cannot be measured or cannot achieve expected outcomes your projects will not be as fruitful as you desire. It’s kind of the whole point of project managing changes. You want certain outcomes, but unless you are clear about your expectations and what the outcomes will be measured against you will fall short of success. These measurements should set work performance standards more than monetary performance standards. Your employees can control the first (how they show up and the good work they do) more than the latter (how much money shows up as a direct result of their efforts).

Companies regularly set out to change the way they do business whether scaling up operations, merging/acquiring business, or outsourcing, for example. As the story goes, if your organization doesn’t have OKRs and KPIs laid out to measure and improve people performance it will miss the mark and your employees will not be able to exceed your unclear expectations. I have personally seen it play out a few times in instances, for the examples I mention above, where the business practices were not mature enough to analyze the business projection, look ahead at how the bridged business gap would really look if the change initiative projects were performed as outline, and set the right measurements for the right success criteria.

Most companies think about the bottom-line dollar figures they expect will pan out (Many don’t want to share these profitability targets with the team anyway) and when early returns don’t meet expectations, they either go in a new direction too early and abandon all hope, or finally dig in and start asking the tough questions they should have asked at the beginning. When assessing your business and change project needs you should ask the 5 Why’s (Refer to the Ishikawa Diagram). While these questions can help you figure out the root cause of business immaturity it can also help you figure out why something is working. The root cause of why building up your business is not working usually has little to do with the money you are throwing at the problem, and more to do with understanding what makes your subject experts good at what they do, so you can then translate it to a wider scale, often new workers.

At level 4 organizational project management maturity, you are now repeating your successes, because you are documenting successes, and you have improved processes, project management, and knowledge management. You are seeing the benefits in smooth workflows, project outcomes, professional development, employee satisfaction, and even monetary gains. Having the capacity to handle such growth may even result in exponential returns. Time to bring back bonuses/promotions!