How To Get our Process to the Next Level of Maturity?

  Brad Clark shares another Q&A session based on a Maturity Forum participant’s question:

Q:  “Our company is growing very fast and we need to get our process to the next level of maturity to support an enterprise company – can you provide some guidance to help us manage this?”

A:  This has become a concern for many companies that are either growing fast in their market space or companies that have changed their corporate direction to grow more “organically”, which was the case when we built the enterprise project management office and processes at Bank of America.

First, decide which process(es) need to be matured and the relationships between them.  Most organizations automatically go to the Project Execution/Delivery processes because of the real or perceived pain, but fail to look at their portfolio and governance processes that have a direct relationship.  I recommend securing senior executive sponsorship since any maturity effort will cross lines and require this level of support to be successful.

Then put an organization such as a PMO in place as the owners of the maturity initiative and the processes.

And lastly identify the process(es) and their relationships and use a tool such as OPM3^® or CMMI^® to guide the organization through the improvement stages.