P3M3® Portfolio, Programme, and Project Management Maturity Model.

P3M3® has become a key standard amongst maturity models, providing a framework with which organizations can assess their current performance and put improvement plans in place.

P3M3® was released in June 2008, with a further update, Version 2.1, being released in February 2010. The first version was developed as an enhancement to OGC’s Project Management Maturity Model. P3M3® is now owned by AXELOS.

P3M3® consists of a hierarchical collection of elements describing the characteristics of effective processes.

Maturity Levels

P3M3® uses a five-level maturity framework:

•   Level 1 – awareness of process

•   Level 2 – repeatable process

•   Level 3 – defined process

•   Level 4 – managed process

•   Level 5 – optimized process

Process Perspectives

P3M3® focuses on seven Process Perspectives, which exist in all three models and can be assessed at all five Maturity Levels:

1.   Management Control

2.   Benefits Management

3.   Financial Management

4.   Stakeholder Engagement

5.   Risk Management

6.   Organizational Governance

7.   Resource Management

Attributes

Embedded within the Process Perspectives are a number of Attributes. Specific Attributes relate only to a particular Process Perspective. Generic Attributes are common to all Process Perspectives at a given Maturity Level, and include planning, information management, and training and development.

The main target audience is senior executives, portfolio managers and programme managers. However, all roles involved in the maturity of portfolio, programme and project management may find it useful to gain a better understanding of their strengths and weaknesses in order to enable improvement to happen.

P3M3® is a maturity assessment model to assess the project management and programme management as well as the portfolio management in an organization. P3M3® is not an assessment tool for individual projects or programmes.

Strengths

As organizations strive to identify competitive and performance advantages, and leverage them through improved efficiency and delivery, management models designed to assess performance and identify opportunities for improvement are increasingly important. Maturity models in particular have become an essential tool in assessing organizations’ current capabilities and helping them to implement change and improvements in a structured way.

The flexibility of P3M3® allows organizations to review all seven Process Perspectives across all three models – portfolio, programme and project management – but they can also review

just one (or several) of the Process Perspectives, whether across all three models or across only one or two of them. This can be useful to gain a better understanding of an organization’s overall effectiveness in, for example, risk management or resource management.