PMO Maturity Assessment and Improvement Roadmap

CASE STUDY - GLOBAL MINING ORGANISATION

Mining material held during an industrial operation

The Requirement

A global mining organisation engaged Maxica to assess project management maturity within its Special Projects Group. The team delivers strategically important, high-value projects and already operated within a high-level project delivery framework, but leadership wanted a clearer view of how consistently tools, processes and controls were being applied.

Maxica was asked to establish an evidence-based view of current maturity and identify practical improvements that could strengthen project management best practice across the group. The assessment was delivered through Maxica's PMO as a Service capability.

Mining operation illustrating complex project delivery

The Challenge

The assessment focused on a major mining project in Canada. The challenge was to look beyond documented process and understand how project management worked in practice across a complex delivery environment.

Maxica needed to identify strengths, gaps and improvement priorities across governance and delivery disciplines, then translate the findings into a realistic roadmap that could move the organisation toward a more optimised state without making claims beyond the available evidence.

Mining team representing stakeholder participation in the PMO assessment

Our Approach

Maxica applied its established PMO maturity assessment process, benchmarking the organisation against the CMMI scale. The review combined project artefact analysis, standards and policy review, stakeholder interviews and surveys to build a rounded view of current capability.

Interviews included personnel from vice-president level through to engineers, both inside and outside the project team. The assessment examined eight themes: project framework awareness and adherence, management control, financial management, stakeholder management, risk management, organisational governance, resource management, and vendor and contract management.

The full exercise, including analysis and leadership playback, was completed within six weeks.

Mining project team representing evidence-based PMO improvement planning

Our Solution

Maxica converted the assessment evidence into three practical outputs for the Special Projects leadership team.

Leadership Playback: A presentation combining empirical findings with specialist PMO interpretation of survey feedback, project artefacts and stakeholder input.
Maturity Heatmaps: Clear visual comparisons of current and target maturity across principal Project Portfolio Management components, highlighting where improvement could be focused.
Improvement Roadmap: Prioritised recommendations across the short, medium and long term, grounded in practical project delivery experience and designed to support achievable maturity improvements.

Mine tunnel representing clearer direction from the PMO maturity roadmap

Benefits

The assessment gave leadership a structured, evidence-based view of project delivery maturity and a practical route for improvement.

Cost Avoidance: The review identified areas where additional programme cost could arise if weaknesses were left unaddressed, enabling those risks to be incorporated into the improvement roadmap.

Voice of the Customer: Evidence from project teams, stakeholders and other parts of the organisation created a 360-degree view of delivery performance, allowing strengths and weaknesses to be triangulated rather than relying on a single perspective.

Clear Priorities: Heatmaps and a phased roadmap gave the Special Projects Group a visible set of actions for strengthening governance, controls and project management practice.

Mining professionals representing collaborative PMO assessment

Why it Worked

The engagement combined a recognised maturity benchmark with evidence from the people, processes and artefacts involved in day-to-day project delivery. That mix allowed Maxica to test documented standards against operational reality and present findings in a form leadership could act on.

The six-week delivery window also kept the assessment focused. Rather than producing a theoretical maturity report, Maxica translated findings into visible heatmaps and phased recommendations aligned to the resources and budget available to the client.

Maxica consultant ready to discuss PMO improvement

Learn More

If you need an independent view of PMO maturity, governance or project delivery controls, Maxica can assess current capability and turn the evidence into a practical improvement roadmap.

Call us on +44 333 700 2014

Email us on hello@maxica.com