12.4. MATURITY MODELS: WHERE DO YOU AND YOUR ORGANIZATION STAND?

Once PPM has been implemented, understanding your organization's maturity will help greatly in defining the scope and effort of next steps for improving its effectiveness. There are several maturity models in existence that you can use to assess your company's level of maturity. These can help you to baseline your current performance and establish where you want to be.

One of the more popular models has five levels of maturity, described as follows (Office of Government Commerce, 2008):

• Level 1: Getting started/awareness/initial

• Level 2: Developing/focusing/repeatable/knowledge

• Level 3: Complying/practicing/competence/defined

• Level 4: Sustaining/exploiting/managed/excellence

• Level 5: Advocating/transforming/optimized

The key imperative of a maturity model is to help an organization assess its level in absolute terms and then develop a roadmap to rise to higher levels. Typically, the following areas are the focus of attention:

• Resource allocation (Are people assigned to the right things?).

• Alignment with strategic imperatives (Are we working on the right things?).

• Visibility into project spend (Are we keeping to budget?).

• Applications (Are we managing our current inventory effectively and efficiently?).

• Balanced portfolio (Is the sum of all projects supporting the total business?).