The Project Management Maturity (PMM) model

The Project Management Maturity (PMM) model is a fairly hot topic these days and nights. There are waves of consultants who can help organizations examine their "maturity level" which is fairly much always listed hierarchically with less mature being worse than more fully developed. Proponents of the idea say the PMM model shows the functions of an organization to manage jobs. Whether you're a lover of this assessment or not, there is another kind of maturity model that I've experienced privately and it has to do with the use and deployment of Organization Project Management (EPM) systems.
When we work together with organizations that are deploying a project management system, it can very popular among find that the desires of the people doing the deploying is that the can get to enjoy every factor of the new system they've just acquired demonstrated. While there are some showcase organizations that contain had the capacity to do this really much less common than you'd hope.

Furthermore likely is that there is a sequence of consumption of such systems.

By the most basic level the company aims to see planning as the first wave. A lot of organizations never get over and above this. They make a basic schedule, bronze the GANTT chart then support it on the wall structure of the project team's office. People consider the plaque from time to time nostalgically as they remember the fine point out of their schedule just before the project started out.

While I'm being a lttle bit cruel at those who are only using their expensive project software to make a bar graph and or chart, there may be value in doing so. Creating an prepared schedule would make the task participants think about how precisely the work should be positioned together and is much more effective than doing nothing or maybe making a spreadsheet list.

Next in line in our experience is typically tracking. A great organization a little more "mature" in the utilization of their project management system does not only plan, they'll trail their schedules, advancing them regularly with the improvement currently and even look forward with projected activities as the plans progress. For many organizations, preventing here is effective. They're planning in their task management system, then they're working the plan by updating it regularly and even giving useful information to management.

Once planning and tracking are managed, organizations usually look to the resource management problem and how it might get resolved using their project management. Resources can have many aspects as I've discussed in here before but at most basic level, resource allowance (assigning the work to resources) is a major step, followed by resource examination of some kind.

Price management is the last typical area and many organizations never get here. At a fundamental level, having a cost estimate busted down by phase or better yet by job in the project is a good costing start. Tracking the actual costs either by hours or by dollars is the next level.

I'll put a fifth area here for "Advanced" subjects and put Risk Analysis, File management, automated workflows in here. There are also advanced areas in each of the other four areas I've discussed until now. If we were to diagram this the way that such things are generally diagrammed, we might wrap up with this:



This kind of is the sequential kind of thinking and the condition I have with this is the fact it implies that level one particular is worse than level 2 and if only you could "get" to level 2 you'd have an improved organization. In truth, I think the picture would be better displayed such as this:



In this kind of representation, at least we get away from notion that each level higher is an improved thing or that each wedge to the right is better than the block out to the left. In fact, even though We've described that, inside our experience, most organizations learn to use their project management systems to do planning, really probably a good thing to assume that they could start almost everywhere. Some organizations could start working on resources, perhaps, or on risks, or on document management.

Intended for each factor I've explained, we can also think about more effort being put into that aspect to advance it further. Anytime we think about that for a short while, we might conclude with a plan looking something like this:



Now factor that We've described has more more detail of use of the project system and perhaps can return more appeal from the system. Planning for example, can be prolonged to incorporate multi-project planning. The algorithm for scheduling could be further extended into Critical Chain scheduling. Extra detail could be added still and could work with inter-related schedules with inter-project links. Precisely the same should go for tracking. If we extend beyond just percent complete, perhaps we now can look at monitoring the resource consumption along with the tasks. Or perhaps we go from percent complete to staying duration tracking which is more advanced. From staying duration tracking, we go to weighted milestones, something that's often used in Earned Value calculations even though costs are not included.