It is widely accepted that a well-designed topology (networked) of PMOs within an organization, through their interactions and services they provide, creates a long-lasting impact on an organization’s achievement and sustainment of its strategic objectives.
The growth of an organization through its ability to realize projects in a practicable way is directly linked to the strategically aligned PMO services, offered and delivered across one or more collaborative PMOs with optimized capabilities and capacities to deliver those services.
The Association of International Project Officers (AIPMO) developed its PMO Maturity Model based around the Strategic PMO Lifecycle framework. This enables maturity assessments to be made and provides development activities as an input to a roadmap towards achieving an external benchmarkable certification based on a concept of “maximum potential benefits” and secondly an internal organizational benchmark based on a concept of “maximum potential value” for one or more PMOs.
Using a number of academically ground models with industry proven concepts, AIPMO’s PMO Maturity Model assesses the maturity of one or more PMOs within an organization.
The AIPMO’s PMO maturity model is effectively built around the usage of nine critical checkpoints. These nine key assessment points determine your current maturity levels and deliver detailed recommendations to enable the generation of sustained value from your existing PMO investments going forward.
Traditional maturity models equate consistency with maturity and therefore focus typically on the procedural aspects of a PMO. The term “maturity” is not the best term to be associated with PMOs, as PMOs need to constantly adapt and therefore ensure that they have the capability to offer at any time the services needed within and across organization(s) in an optimized way.
AIPMO’s Maturity model includes nine checkpoints developed to go beyond those limitations of traditional assessment by using explicit and near tacit knowledge such as using PMO principles, governance paradigm, decision model, culture model, leadership model, and answering the much harder questions around capabilities to discover both current maturity level and provide recommendations to make the PMO provide sustainable value. The following checkpoints use a combination of techniques such as interviews, online surveys, document reviews, organizational design, and PMO topology and PMO Services designs to determine the internal (max potential value) benchmark and the external (maximum potential benefits) benchmark. The checkpoints are for one or more PMOs but described in the single tense.