:AACE CERTIFICATION 2009-2010:

This week, Dr PDG wanted us to do a assessment on our own company, what we think of our organization's maturity base on Portfolio, Program and Project Management Capability Maturity. Its a interesting topic to talk about. This assessment could be compared to the PRINCE2 methodology which is well recognized and even said to be proved in some place;

PRINCE2 (PRojects IN Controlled Environments) is a process-based method for effective project management. PRINCE2 is a de facto standard used extensively by the UK Government and is widely recognised and used in the private sector, both in the UK and internationally. The method PRINCE2 is in the public domain, offering non-proprietorial best practice guidance on project management. PRINCE2 is a registered trademark of OGC.
- Information collected from http://www.prince2.com/what-is-prince2.asp

The Office of Government Commerce (OGC) is an independent office of Her Majesty's Treasury, a department of state in the government of the United Kingdom. The purpose of the OGC is to support the procurement and acquisition process of public sector organisations in the UK through policy and process guidance and the negotiation of overarching service and provision frameworks. This is intended to improve value for money to the taxpayer, optimising the level of taxpayers equity directed towards the delivery of services.
- Information collected from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Government_Commerce

Remember that PRINCE2 methodology is owned by OGC which is a single group / entity belonging to a single organization in a single location having the same objective and their perspective, challenge and environment they encounter is exactly the same.

Coming back to assessing our own organization, it becomes much complicated as one single international brand / company, having different entities located in different countries, they are driven by different drivers (Country Manager) who may have different perspective, focus and challenge as environment, customer, culture plays a major role on how WoW (Ways of Working) is define to fit into the organization in order to satisfy the local market and/or customer. Conclusion for "Company Assessment" is, it cannot be assessed by "Company", rather it should be assessed by individual entity, the local cooperation.

On the other hand, when try to assess a local operation office, it bring up a question if it is suitable to use a standard set of tools or applying a standard methodology to its project management. Like many other companies, my organization has a set of great tools, a well define methodology and processes from sales to project delivery to customers. All customer project starts from sales and that's why we we have a well define and structured Sales Process which has the perfect handshake to the Customer Project Manager (CPM) who in turn using the another process known as the PROPS-C that helps the CPM in delivering the project to the customer. In the process of delivery, it is managed and monitored with a standardized governance model. Assessment of the deliverable through these processes is then measured via KPI and related quantitative techniques. These measure could include Project Evaluation, Project Margin, Compliance to Billing Plan, PROPS-C Adherence, Add-on Sales, etc.

Understanding the difference in environment, culture and customer, tools or way of management must be different and adapt to the needs and be apply correctly to suit the needs. I feel that in a way my organization mature in terms of project management as they do see the needs to evolve, where company corporate directives, models and methodology are not simply applied or followed, but adaptations are made, change what needs to be changed and streamline what is required and what is not required for local needs. To allow and to be able to be flexible, I think that needs a certain level of maturity in a organization. And with these well structured tools, it encompass another set of tools for assessment and measurement of each organization's (country unit's) maturity in term of its service delivery and operations. We could see ourselves as a mature organization when looking at the result of the assessment which runs the evaluation of the country unit that analysis the gaps and give solutions for the improvements, yet we may still be looking at gaps base on the variation to the guideline that might not have been fully adapt to that specific country which then makes the guideline to be imperfect. And if the guideline is not the right guideline to use, how can the gap analysis effectively find the true gap that exist ?

I can safely say that we do have a fairly good assessment tools, but there is no perfect tools that could ever exist as long as the tools is not customized to use for each location and if it is standardized to be used in all country units.