Has your Organization levelled up to LEVEL 5 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 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 5 Project Management Maturity:

5) Expert
* Past mistakes are no longer issues.
* Continuous Improvement.
* Individuals, Teams, and Organizations are “Performing” optimally at their best and “Adjourning” projects leads to business progression for next projects and assignments. (It takes fewer people to do operational processes, but your workforce is freed up to expand your business offering.)
* People, Process, Tools, Collaboration, Communication, and Coordination excel from project to project.
* Professional Development leads to further Business Progress and behaving as One Team.

Think progress over perfection. The beauty of project management is that it is dynamic and constantly changing for the better as the world around it progresses. It is both an art and a science that never fully reaches perfection as we know it. It can be perfect for the time and place, but as time moves on it must develop to meet new demands of current variables, and there is always a lot of variability and uniqueness from one endeavor to the next, one time to the next, and so on and so forth.

I get the impression from a lot of other business maturity models that they think Lean operations favors staffing fewer people, but I don’t think that is the intent of Lean Business Models. If you want to get to level 4 and 5 maturities, across your organization, you must not backslide and undercut the professionals on your team who are pushing for real growth and $$$ for everyone. Instead note this:

Many companies think when they are doing more with fewer people that it is time for cutbacks, when in reality the opposite is true. The people who have less to do are likely your “innovators”, who have simply worked themselves out of work, and it is time to promote them to growth projects that will exponentially grow your business offering. If what you currently have them doing is filler material and not high priority you are undervaluing them. They could be of most value to you going forward in another position (perhaps a continuous improvement project management position where there will always be important work to be done).