Project Management Maturity

The changing nature of living order ensures that organizations that continue to do what they've always done will, sooner or later, find themselves unable to compete in the modern market place. Those that succeed often embrace some form of continuous improvement, a key practice of Lean project management in which organizations focus on improving "an entire value stream or an individual process to create more value with less waste". Or to put it more simply, they strive to create "a culture of continuous improvement where all employees are actively engaged in improving the company".

The exact form continuous improvement takes in an organization varies depending on the industry, the current state of the market, and so on. But for project-centered organizations, a focus on project management maturity, and the organizational learning that goes along with it, are essential components of any continuous improvement effort. Indeed, as David A. Garvin explains, continuous improvement is impossible without learning:

How, after all, can an organization improve without first learning something new? Solving a problem, introducing a product, and reengineering a process all require seeing the world in a new light and acting accordingly. In the absence of learning, companies - and individuals - simply repeat old practices. Change remains cosmetic, and improvements are either fortuitous or short-lived.

The term project management maturity refers to the "progressive development of an enterprise-wide project management approach, methodology, strategy, and decision-making process. The appropriate level of maturity will vary for each organization based on its specific goals, strategies, resource capabilities, scope, and needs". Before you can assess an organization's overall project management maturity, it's helpful to have an objective standard of comparison to help you understand the context in which you are operating. In other words, you need a project maturity model, also known as a capability maturity model. A maturity model is a set of developmental stages that can be used to evaluate an organization's state of maturity in a particular domain. More specifically, according to Becker, Knackstedt, and Poppelbuss, a maturity model

represents an anticipated, desired, or typical evolution path of these objects shaped as discrete stages. Typically, these objects are organizations or processes. The bottom stage stands for an initial state that can be, for instance, characterized by an organization having little capabilities in the domain under consideration. In contrast, the highest stage represents a conception of total maturity. Advancing on the evolution path between the two extremes involves a continuous progression regarding the organization's capabilities or process performance.

Among other things, a maturity model offers

  • The benefit of a community's prior experiences
  • A common language and a shared vision
  • A framework for prioritizing actions
  • A way to define what improvement means for your organization (Select Business Solutions n.d.)


The first widely used maturity model, the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), was developed in the software industry in the late 1980's by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University, working in conjunction with the United States Department of Defense. Mary Rouse describes the five levels of CMM maturity as follows:

  • At the initial level, processes are disorganized, even chaotic. Success is likely to depend on individual efforts, and is not considered to be repeatable, because processes would not be sufficiently defined and documented to allow them to be replicated.
  • At the repeatable level, basic project management techniques are established, and successes could be repeated, because the requisite processes would have been established, defined, and documented.
  • At the defined level, an organization has developed its own standard software process through greater attention to documentation, standardization, and integration.
  • At the managed level, an organization monitors and controls its own processes through data collection and analysis.
  • At the optimizing level, processes are constantly being improved through monitoring feedback from current processes and introducing innovative processes to better serve the organization's particular needs.


Since the development of the CMM, over a hundred maturity models have been developed for the IT industry alone (Becker, Knackstedt and Poppelbuss 2009). Meanwhile, other industries have developed their own models, each designed to articulate the essential stages of maturity for a particular type of organization. Developing and implementing proprietary maturity models, and assessment tools to determine where an organization falls on the maturity spectrum, is a specialty of countless business consulting firms. Around the world, the most widely recognized maturity model is the Organizational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3), developed by the Project Management Institute. The OPM3 is designed to help an organization support its organizational strategy from the project level on up through the portfolio and program levels.

The ultimate goal of any maturity model is to help an organization change where change will introduce clear benefits. According to Joseph A. Sopko, "research from many sources continues to show that higher organizational maturity is synonymous with higher performance". As maturity models become more widely used, project-based organizations should factor in

the market value of being recognized as a reliable supplier. If the organization's maturity is lower than customer or market expectations, it may be viewed as a high-risk supplier that would add performance risk to its customers' programs. And, obviously, if the organization's maturity is lower than that of its competitors, it will lose competitive advantage since higher OPM maturity has been correlated with reliably delivering to plan and meeting customer expectations.