P3M3: behind the acronym is an important tool

Project Management is full of acronyms. PID, WBS, ROI… there are hundreds. Some of them help us, some of them confuse us.

P3M3 is a troublesome acronym that’s been around for a few years. Some people like it, some hate it, some don’t understand it. P3M3 is certainly not a good acronym, but don’t be put off. Take the time to understand it, and you will discover a useful tool-set that can help any organisation to measure its progress in Project Management and related areas.

Firstly, let’s decode the troublesome acronym. It’s a confusing acronym, because the acronym is not the sum of P3 + M3, as you might expect. No, P3M3 is the fusion of two other concepts, MM + P3M (but neither concept actually exists as a stand-alone acronym)

    1.    MM is about Maturity Models
    2.    P3M is  Project Management, Programme Management and Portfolio Management

So P3M3 is about measuring your team’s maturity to manage projects, programmes and portfolios. 

P3M3 comes from the UK, and belongs to same family as Prince2, MSP, MoP and P3O. If you are using one or more of these methods, then it will directly help your team to measure your progress; if you are not, then don’t worry, they are designed to be general purpose models, and you can still use these tools.

Let’s deal with the two parts separately

1) MM = Maturity models.

P3M3 is based on models, which help us to measure maturity. Each model tries to express one aspect of maturity. 

A maturity model attempts to measure your team’s maturity, on a scale from 1 to 5, based on defined best practice. It’s not just an arbitrary measurement, it’s a well designed model based on a set of criteria founded in proven best practice.

For example, P3M3 contains a maturity model for project management (called PjM3). This is based on a 360° set of measurements of project management maturity, using 7 dimensions such as financial management, risk management and resource management. This can be used by any team, whether it is using Prince2 or not. For the Prince2 community, there is dedicated model to measure the team’s ability to run better projects using Prince2. (This version is called P2MM).

2) P3M = the management of change initiatives (projects, programmes and portfolios)

P3 is a useful little acronym. It stands for Projects, Programmes and Portfolios. These are increasingly called “Change Initiatives”. They are three different ways of managing change.

Project Management has been around for years, and many organisations have reasonable maturity in project management. Programme Management is more recent, and Portfolio Management is the new arrival. All three are tools for change, to help the organisation to manage change efficiently and effectively.

So P3M is about management of change, and P3M3 is about measuring your organisation maturity to manage change.

Some organisations manage change well. They implement a strategy which changes the organisation. They innovate, adapt and survive. Their change management is effective.  When they invest in a project (or a programme or a portfolio), they can expect a good return on that investment.

So that is why P3M3 is so important. It measures your organisation’s ability to change. To innovate. To adapt. To survive.

Concretely, P3M3 drives improvement. It helps you to assess your maturity, objectively and with a structured 360° view. When you know your strengths and weaknesses, you can improve. If you know that, for example, your project financial management is fairly strong (say, level 3), but your project risk management is weak (level 1), you can launch some targeted improvements in risk management.

That’s a fast track to improvement. A fast track to better management of your projects, programmes and portfolios. Which means more efficient and more effective change management for your organisation.

That’s why P3M3 is so useful.

Mapping the future, mapping the past

 This is about understanding the past. It’s a case study, but it’s more than that. It’s about how we can better understand the past if we have a frame of reference.

The case study explains how a large company improved its project & portfolio management.

This multi-national organisation was structured as 7 business units. They had an ambitious change agenda. To deliver this huge amount of change, they needed to improve their project management.

They ran a 3-phase improvement initiative to improve project management
    ❑    Phase 1 introduced Prince2 project management, supported by heavy-duty EPM tools (Enterprise Project Management software)
    ❑    Phase 2 measured regularly the improving maturity, by measuring the use of Prince2-based methods and the tools. With these measures, they found the weak spots, and took corrective action
    ❑    Phase 3 introduced portfolio reporting. It started once the level of maturity of Project Management was acceptable - it needed good quality project data as the starting point for consolidated portfolio reporting.

We can understand this case study in terms of P3O. That will be our frame of reference. P3O  provides organisations with a top-down approach for improving their P3 (P3 stands for projects, programmes and portfolios). The O stands for Offices, so P3 + O gives P3O.

So let’s use the P3O framework.  How does this case study look in P3O terms?

Retrospectively, we can detect the gradual construction of a P3O model, as the 3 phases advanced
    ❑    Phase 1. Local CoE functions were set up (Centres of Excellence) supporting the deployment of Prince2.
The local CoEs
    ⁃    published standards, procedures, templates
    ⁃    provided training, coaching
    ⁃    ensured tool support
    ❑    Phase 2. A centralised the CoE function emerged. The local CoEs were merged into a single unified CoE.
The central CoE
    ⁃    measured the maturity of Prince2 and tool using with a P3P3 approach (P3M3 is a maturity model)
    ⁃    provided an Information Portal with standards, procedures, templates, etc
    ⁃    continued to provide coaching to teams with low maturity
    ❑    Phase 3. A Portfolio Office structure was deployed, with a central Organisational Portfolio Office managed by a senior manager.
Each Portfolio Office
    ⁃    introduced Portfolio Design - budget management, demand management, resource optimisation, portfolio optimisation
    ⁃    coordinated Portfolio Delivery - monitoring and control of projects, data consolidation, status reporting

This provided the foundations for solid Project Management.
We can see that the P3O support was a key enabler
    ❑    The P3O structure was a key enabler of for project management.  Without support from the CoE structures, this major Prince2 and tools deployment would not have succeeded, and the high maturity levels in Project Management would not have been achieved.
    ❑    The P3O structure was also an essential enabler for Portfolio Management structure. Without the Portfolio Office, the ambitious work to structure Portfolio Management would not have progressed. It was beyond the reach of the business managers responsible for the portfolios - the support of the Portfolio Offices in the P3O model was vital.

By looking back at the past, we learn lessons by finding a good frame of reference.

Now look forward to the future. To improve your organisation’s project management, use a good frame of reference. Try using the P3O framework to map out the future.

CMMI + Prince2 = a pathway to process improvement

Intro
This case study explains how a QA team used part of CMMI to measure – and enhance – the success of a Prince2 implementation in the IT division of a large European bank. The choice of CMMI PPQA as the QA toolkit (rather than a Prince2 based QA toolkit) was advantageous, as it allowed the QA team to focus on the real PM process rather than the formal Prince2 process.

Context
In 2007, my client’s IT division had a new project management process which it was struggling to impose. New and powerful tools for project management were proving hard to use, and were an additional barrier to process improvement.

There were around 500 concurrent IT projects in 7 portfolios spread over 3 countries, with about 130 PMs (project managers). Note the meaning of “IT” for the bank at this period: the “IT division” had responsibility for ICT infrastructure and operations; various “IS divisions” handled software and process change projects.

Management was very focussed on projects and wanted to drive PM process improvement. There was a major and vital IT transformation programme with an annual 20 million euro budget which was viewed as a vehicle for process improvement.

The PMO for IT was large (normally between 8 and 10 people), with the equivalent of 2 people working exclusively on PPQA. In mid 2007, most of the team worked on coaching and training – in 2008, the focus turned increasingly to other tasks (reporting, resource management, etc).

Process context
The bank was implementing project management as a process in IT and IS, based on the Prince2 process model. There was top management support for project improvement using defined processes, with KPIs to measure the process.

The decision was taken by IT in early 2007 to use the CMMI PPQA process area as the model for process improvement and therefore for providing the KPIs to measure progress.

What is PPQA?
PPQA is one of the 22 process areas in CMMI. In broad terms PPQA intervenes in the project process to
• Perform periodic project audits to assess compliance
• Help teams get back into compliance where needed
• Find opportunities to coach and improve.

PPQA details
A series of metrics was agreed with management, about 30 metrics per project, addressing 3 levels of project management maturity. Each individual metric was fully defined, both in terms of its process objective, and also the evidence to be examined to decide whether a project was compliant.

For each portfolio, a large and representative number of projects was selected, for example 40 projects out of 100 for the infrastructure team of 25 PMs. We sought to assess at least one project per PM.

An audit procedure and the PPQA assessment schedule was published and agreed with management (middle level IT management and portfolio managers). The analysis of a portfolio took between 2 and 4 weeks total elapsed time. The whole iteration for all portfolios took 3 months.

Each selected project was assessed by the PPQA analyst. The PPQA analyst published intermediate results, giving the chance for an appeals procedure and/or for corrections by the PM; and then final results. All results were stored and consolidated.

Results were communicated to the PM, to the portfolio manager; and in summary (consolidated form) to middle and senior IT management; and to the group.

Statistical analysis showing improvements in time over successive iterations was highly useful in motivating teams to participate in improvement activities

Overview of the 4 iterations
2Q07 – mixed results – drove improvements in the process documentation and training content
4Q07 – significant improvements in compliancy – boosted credibility of the project improvement initiative
2Q08 – assessment very focussed on Prince2 – emphasis on common process within whole group
4Q08 – new assessment model - truer measure of IT project compliance – actionable results

Why we used PPQA and not a Prince2 maturity assessment
We used PPQA as our toolkit for QA. This gave us a generic approach where our assessment was a measure of the effective process in use (and not just of the Prince2 textbook process). For example, a key part of the process was entering and maintaining accurate data in the PM tool. This is not part of Prince2, but was part of the process we measured. Equally, IT management stressed the validation of the project mandate, and again this is not part of Prince2, but was one of our key measures in PPQA.


In the 3rd iteration, in spring 2008, to satisfy group requirements, we used an assessment which was highly focussed on Prince2. This assessment generated the least useful data of all 4 iterations, as it missed so many essential process elements. This iteration was a negative “lesson learned” - it confirmed to us the advantage of using our “generic” CMMI PPQA approach against a Prince2 maturity model (based on the OGC P3M3 model)

Summary
In this large IT team, the process area of CMMI called PPQA was successfully used as a tool to measure and improve project management process compliance (even though the process that we measured was based on Prince2 rather than CMMI).



Reference: Project Management Success with CMMI, James Persse, Prentice Hall 2007

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