Maturity models are tools that can benchmark current performance against best practise. It provides valuable information on the current status of operations and point out areas for improvement that could increase the operational effectiveness, not just from a processes perspective but also the involved people, the tools used and the interaction of different disciplines within an organisation.

P3M3 is a management maturity model looking across an organization at how it delivers its projects, programmes and portfolio. P3M3 is unique in that it considers the whole system and not just at the processes.

P3M3 provides three maturity models that can be used separately to focus on specific areas of the business, or more generally to help the organization assess the relationships between their portfolios, programmes and projects.

The three P3M3 maturity models are:

• Portfolio Management
• Programme Management
• Project Management

Structure

Each sub-model is further broken down into seven perspectives:

• Organizational governance
• Management control
• Benefits management
• Risk management
• Stakeholder management
• Finance management
• Resource management

The P3M3 model has five maturity levels:

• Level 1: Awareness
• Level 2: Repeatable
• Level 3: Defined
• Level 4: Managed
• Level 5: Optimized

P3M3 allows an assessment of the process employed, the competencies of people, the tools deployed and the management information used to manage and deliver improvements. This allows organizations to determine their strengths and weaknesses in delivering change.

There are no interdependencies between the models so an assessment may be against one, two or all of the sub-models. It is possible for an organization to be better at programme management than it is at project management.

Benefits

Through baselining an organization’s performance it is possible to identify areas where an organization can most effectively increase its project, programme and portfolio capability. Therefore the sort of benefits expected from using P3M3 to develop and implement an improvement plan would be:

• Cost savings
  • On delivering project outputs and programme outcomes
  • Integrate processes across an organization
  • More effective use of budgets
• Improved benefits delivery
• Improved quality of delivered projects and programmes
• Improved customer satisfaction
• Increase return on investment
• Providing plans for continual progression
• Recognizing achievements from previous investment in capability improvement
• Focusing on the organization’s maturity, not specific initiatives (you can run good programmes and projects without having high levels of maturity – but not consistently).