Promoting good project management practice

How The PMO Professionals helped a portfolio office to find their "Best of Breed"

The Client organisation had grown by acquisition and had multiple change teams, each doing things their way.

The PMO Professionals were tasked with assessing the teams' project management maturity to identify and promote good project management practice.

The brief from the Group Head of Transformational Change was simple:

"Find out where we're weak and make it better. Find out where we're strong and spread it."

Working closely with stakeholders, The PMO Professionals:

Guided representatives from each team through a project management maturity self-assessment tool. Guidance was necessary to ensure standardisation of contributions – particularly the lower maturity teams, who tended to overestimate their performance.
Compared the teams against each other and a hypothetical benchmark organisation of a similar size and type.
Identified areas of project management practice that were at low levels of maturity, although they were considered highly important for organisational performance.
Identified the team with the highest project management maturity in each project management area.
Recommended a series of focus areas for maturity increase, ranked in order of priority based on the importance of achieving organisational objectives and the extent of maturity increase indicated.
Created a Community of Practice to promote good project management practice from the highest maturity team for a given project management area to all other teams.

The PMO Professionals enabled the organisation to:

Identify pockets of existing good project management practice in multiple areas.
Identify areas of project management practice where maturity was lower than desired.
Create a mechanism to promote the good project management practice identified.
Minimise resistance that may have come from an approach mandated by the central portfolio office.