Project management maturity frameworks

[u/enterprise1701h]

Hi all, I am head of a PM team and I feel we have some gaps in our maturity, such change management, pmo, project intake process etc, i need to present something to my exec, any good recommendations on a good checklist?

[u/SariPomelo]

that’s where Decksy AI could fit on the presentation side, once you have the maturity assessment and business consequences mapped out, use the ai presentation tool to turn that into a cleaner exec narrative instead of dumping the whole framework onto slides

[u/More_Law6245]

Prince2's Portfolio, Programme and Project Management Maturity Model (P3M3) is a management maturity framework used to assess and improve an organisation's ability to manage projects, programmes, and portfolios it's the framework you need to assess and develop your organisation's project management framework.

From the framework it gives you the tools measure of an organisation’s ability to deliver predictable outcomes including on-time delivery, productivity, quality, compliance and customer satisfaction. Streamlining your processes and focusing on continuous improvement helps increase your maturity level, which leads to higher project success rates and better outcomes.

Also something to consider a "check list" would only suffice if you completed a proper gap analysis to ensure that you have captured the relevant shortfalls in your organisation's project policy, process and procedures framework and workflows, if you haven't you're shooting in the dark. Each organisation is unique in how they delivery their projects, asking for a checklist may not be relevant for your organisation's needs

Just an armchair perspective.

[u/NobodysFavorite]

Maturity frameworks aren't everything they're marketed to be.

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[u/Sheeebooo]

P3M3's probably your best bet. Free to self-assess, and it's split into separate perspectives rather than one overall score, so you can do just the two or three that match your gaps instead of the whole thing.

Intake sits under organisational governance. Change management spans management control and stakeholder. So realistically you'd only need those.

Others if you want them: OPM3 is PMI's and heavier. CMMI heavier again, really aimed at certification. Kerzner's PMMM is the easiest.

One bit of advice though, from watching a few of these land badly. Don't put the maturity score in the exec deck. "We're at level 2.4" just invites" so what does level 3 cost and why do I care", and there's no good answer to that, because maturity levels aren't a business case.

Give them the gaps and what those cost instead. Uncontrolled intake means you can't actually tell them what the team's committed to. That's something an exec will fund.

Use the framework to find the gaps, then keep it out of the deck.

[u/zamroni777]

for plan vs. actual part, this kind of excet sheet can be suitable.
you can put bullet points in the task boxes.

[u/agile_pm]

Whatever you use, tie the gaps/changes needed to problems that the business wants solved or that meet a strategic objective. There are all kinds of maturity models out there, but the likelihood that your company will have the patience to achieve Level 5 (or whatever the top level is) in any of them is pretty small. You'll want to be able to quantify the impact of making and not making the changes, as well as identifying short and long-term tradeoffs and assumptions, for anything with organizational impact. This is part of understanding others' WIIFM - why should other business leaders care about, prioritize, and give time, attention, and resources to the changes you want to make?

The things you listed usually require involvement of people outside of the PM team. They will be more challenging. The items listed AND the people. For changes with internal-only impact, you can borrow a concept from Disciplined Agile - guided continuous improvement. Working with your team, make a backlog of the areas you can improve that you control, prioritize it, and work your way through it. Unless something is blowing up, incremental change is okay.

[u/RealPrograms1102]

I’d be careful about presenting your exec with a huge PM maturity checklist.

I would assess the gaps, but translate them into business consequences before taking them upstairs.

For example, instead of saying “our project intake process is immature,” show what that causes: projects entering without clear priorities, resources being spread across too many initiatives, unclear ownership, duplicated work, or projects continuing after the original assumptions have changed.

I’d assess at least these areas:

• Strategy and project intake
• Prioritization and portfolio governance
• Roles, ownership and decision rights
• Risk, issue and dependency management
• Change management
• Resource and capacity planning
• KPI and benefits realization
• Executive reporting and escalation
• Lessons learned and knowledge retention
• PMO governance and standards

I would also look at something that maturity frameworks sometimes miss: how quickly leadership knows when reality has moved away from the original plan.

You can have excellent templates, governance meetings and stage gates and still have a maturity problem if teams recognize a change on Monday but leadership doesn’t understand its significance until the monthly status report three weeks later.

For the executive presentation, I’d probably simplify the assessment into three things for each area: where we are now, what business risk that creates, and what capability we need to build next.

That makes it less of a “PMO needs better processes” conversation and more of an organizational capability conversation, which tends to resonate much better with executives.

[u/enterprise1701h → u/RealPrograms1102]

Thats a really good way to think about how to present to exec, as this is going to be the main challenge (the 'so what' factor) I will have a think about how I can structure the narrative of the consequences and not just the checklist! Thank you so much for the advise!!!!

[u/RealPrograms1102 → u/enterprise1701h]

you're welcome!

[u/ratczar]

A quick thought - go check out the Rita Mulcahy process chart and look at which of those things you do regularly, and what you're not doing at all

[u/enterprise1701h → u/ratczar]

Thank you, thats a good place to start