Chapter Meeting

Tina T. Slankas, PMP

ORGANIZATIONAL PROJECT MANAGEMENT MATURITY MODEL (OPM3)

About the Program:

Organizational project management refers to the ability of an organization to accomplish individual projects, as well as an overall organizational orientation toward selecting and managing projects individually and collectively in such a way as to support the organization’s strategic goals. Just as individuals benefit from achieving personal maturity, so can organizations.

PMI’s Organizational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3) provides a foundation of knowledge about organizational project management and organizational project management maturity. It assists organizations in understanding and assessing the state of their current organizational project management maturity, and, if they choose, can help them plan an improvement path to become more mature. OPM3 is designed to be easy to understand and use, as well as to be scalable, flexible, and customizable, in order to accommodate the wide range of individual needs and objectives of organizations of varying types and sizes.

Three, interlocking elements of OPM3 make it a unique product in the marketplace:

Knowledge: OPM3 provides a description of organizational project management and organizational project management maturity, why they are important, and a description of how organizational project management maturity can be recognized (the capabilities and corresponding outcomes that need to be present). Together with these definitions and explanatory text, OPM3 also explains the OPM3 Components – a Best Practice, a Capability, an Outcome and a Key Performance Indicator. One of the appendices will be a listing of the relevant Best Practices, including a brief description, that have been identified as contributing to organizational project management maturity. OPM3 also provides explanations of alignment to the Process Groups of the PMBOK. Guide and arranged in a similar fashion to address program and portfolio management within the organization.

Assessment: OPM3 provides users with a tool to compare the characteristics of their current state of organizational project management maturity with those described by the model. This self-assessment tool is based upon a cross-section of key traits distilled from the model. Through assessing itself in relation to these traits, an organization can quantify its own general maturity relative to their capabilities that have been achieved. OPM3’s self assessment also helps the organization identify areas of strengths and weaknesses, in addition to the organization’s general position on the continuum of organizational project management maturity.

Improvement: Based on the results of an assessment, an organization may decide to pursue a course for improvement and consequently determine the number of Best Practices it wants to improve. Organizations may refer to the model’s CD-ROM to view the series of Capabilities leading to each Best Practice in question to identify the prerequisite manageable steps – the path – for planning the journey from their current maturity to an improved state of organizational project management maturity while conserving limited organizational resources.

Used on its own, OPM3 is a tool that may help drive business improvement. When executed in concert with the PMBOK® Guide and Project Manager Competency Development Framework, OPM3 represents a cohesive, encompassing approach to guiding the management of projects, individuals, and achieving organizational strategies.

Speaker Biography

Tina Slankas has worked in the computer industry for 10 years in data networks and information security with a primary emphasis in Project Management. She has been with International Network Services, formerly of Lucent Technologies, for the last four (4) years, and is currently a Senior Network Systems Consultant. Tina is active in the Project Management and Security Practices within International Network Services. Over the last six years Tina has been working on virtual projects, leading teams implementing projects across the country and around the globe.

Since 2001, Tina has been associated with the OPM3 standards development project in various leadership capacities.

Tina received her Masters Degree in Information Systems and Telecommunications in 1998 from Johns Hopkins University and received her PMP in 2001.