Building PMO Maturity Into Mid-Market NFP

The client’s internal PMO engaged Exent for an independent assessment using a best practice framework, revealing low maturity in key areas. Collaborating with stakeholders, Exent swiftly developed a pragmatic roadmap for short to mid-term improvements, aligning with strategic objectives and gaining endorsement from client PMO stakeholders and executives.

The Client

Exent’s client, a mid-market human services organisation, operated a well-run Project Management Office (PMO) overseeing a diverse range of ongoing corporate projects including IT initiatives, business improvements, compliance and regulatory change. As part of their mission of ongoing improvement and the pursuit of project excellence, the client sought external perspective on driving further maturity of the Project Management Office.

CHALLENGE

As is common in many organisations, the client-internal PMO felt it lacked the capability and independence to conduct a comprehensive assessment of its own maturity. In addition, the ability to inject new thinking, challenge and stretch into current models via an external review process was attractive to the client.

In approaching Exent, this organisation sought independent evaluation of PMO capabilities, processes and controls against a comprehensive best practice framework, with detailed and actionable findings that would then drive the change agenda for the mid-term as well as shed insights into project delivery improvements in the very near term.

Exent was able to support the request with a best practice PMO Maturity Framework, based on numerous third party models including P3M3 and OPM3, underpinned by a lean team of PMO experts including recognised OPM3 thought leaders, speakers and authors.

APPROACH

Exent built a genuinely partnered approaches with the client, to build trust and candour into an evaluation process, that would ultimately reward the diligence with clearer insights into PMO improvements.

Our approach to the assessment blended OPM3, P3M3 and Exent’s own EPMO best practices, pragmatically blended with real-world, project delivery experience and insights.

The PMO maturity assessment and recommendations were contextualised within the sector as well as right-sized to the organisation’s scale and ambition, in order to avoid over-engineering.

KEY ELEMENTS OF OUR APPROACH

Key components of our approach included leveraging the Project Management Institute’s (PMI) Organisational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3) framework for the assessment, leveraging aspects of OGC’s Portfolio, Programme, and Project Management Maturity Model (P3M3). We assessed the P3 maturity of the organisation across 40 best practice areas, specifically focusing on the projects selected for inclusion in the review.

Our assessment adhered to a systematic approach aimed at discerning evidence of existing practices and their adherence, allowing the quantification of the organisation’s overall maturity and its constituent components.

The assessment highlighted the areas where maturity was low.

Outcomes

Exent identified major improvements to three key domains: Scope Management, Project Management, and Organisational Planning. Working with key stakeholders, we devised a pragmatic roadmap for improvement, comprising short to mid-term opportunities (ranging from 3 weeks to 14 weeks) to facilitate a swift enhancement in PMO capabilities, resulting in reduced costs and project timelines. We assessed the effort and value associated with these opportunities to facilitate prioritisation.

The prioritisation and sequencing of these improvement opportunities were aligned with the organisation’s assessed maturity and the strategic objectives aimed at elevating project management capabilities throughout the organisation, and as a result of this alignment the findings and actions were endorsed by client PMO stakeholders and executives alike.

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