OPM3 Portugal

• Autor(a) principal: Pinto, José Ângelo da Costa
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.22/8568

Nowadays, it’s getting harder and harder for many organizations to keep their sustainability and remain being market leaders, or just to keep following the market evolution. The concurrency and competency that exists today in the market in each sector is very high and tends to keep growing over the years, resulting in a need for organizations to create and further develop competitive advantages. To be able to keep their sustainability and develop new and improved services and products, associated with the development of competitive advantages, as needed, organizations need to implement Project Management processes, aligned with the top management perspective of what is the definition and how to manage the organizational strategic objectives. The OPM3 Portugal project started at the beginning of 2011, designed by a Project Management expert consultant organization that also does research and development – Ambithus. It was designed to evaluate the Project Management Maturity in Portuguese organizations, applying the Organizational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3®) standard from Project Management Institute (PMI) (PMI 2013b). In order to improve their processes, organizations needed to be assessed on their processes and methodologies in such a way that the applied tools and techniques could be evaluated from a quantity and quality perspective. By doing this, it became possible for an organization to identify which processes were not implemented or were not being established or followed, making this inside knowledge an important and definitive part for the understanding of which strategic implementations were needed to manage the organizational projects, programs, portfolios, activities and the needed resources and it’s management. Over the recent years, all kinds of organizations have attempted to define with more precision their goals and objectives for their short and long term and at the same time specific actions – projects – to organize the strategies to achieve them. However, very often, the strategies outlined do not allow us to achieve the results for which they were designed (Demir & Kocabas, 2010). In order to address this problem, Project Management (PM) emerged as a powerful management system, which is increasingly popular in several industries (Shi, 2011), such as the Information Systems and Technologies (IST) industry. To improve their maturity in Project Management, organizations need to obtain a total control and measurability of their organizational processes and to use maturity models so they can test and compare their current performances against Best Practices, if possible the Best Practices that were established by the industry where they operate (Andersen & Jessen, 2003) (Jugdev & Thomas, 2002). One of the most recognized and used standardized maturity model in project management is the Organizational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3®), organized and managed by the Project Management Institute (PMI) (PMI 2013b). This model, besides providing a method for assessment and systematic improvement for the organization from a simple project to Page 6 of 73 a portfolio of projects, introduces, for the first time, the Best Practices for each one of the processes (Pazderka & Grechenig, 2007). This document explains the OPM3 Portugal project environment and evolvement, the data revision and team development done, the main steps of the investigation and the main concepts applied. To understand the OPM3 Portugal project it is necessary to understand the OPM3® standard principles and the way it has been developed and applied all over the world. In this document it is also presented some of the other models and the reasoning to choose this one is explained. The OPM3 Portugal Project planning and organizing processes, the individual organizational assessments, the country Project Management level, the benefits of the methodology and its main phases are explained. The OPM3® Methodology is also fully explained and also the way it was adapted to the OPM3 Portugal project. This document also addresses the project key results: the scientific project results, the one hundred planned organizations that were addressed and their sectors and dimensions, the cluster processes that were studied by the project team, the several different ways of analyzing the data, the result organization and its cluster association processes. The sectorial maturity is presented for each of the sectors, as it is also presented the improvement plans for those sectors. Jose Angelo's participation on the project is fully explained. The conclusions and future work are also addressed.