PMO Maturity Assessment

CASE STUDY - GLOBAL MINING GIANT

The Requirement

The Special Projects Team of this mining giant undertakes a number of significant, high value ($bn), projects, which are of strategic importance to the organisation. Currently, the delivery of projects within the Special Projects Group follow a high-level standard delivery project framework and although there has been a measure of success in the delivery of projects, there is a recognition of the importance of driving best practice for project management across the organisation.

Maxica has extensive experience conducting PMO maturity assessments and by deploying its PMO as a Service (PMOaaS) capability was able to assess the maturity levels of the Special Projects Group's project management tools, processes and procedures.

The Challenge

Maxica was commissioned to undertake a PMO maturity review across a major mining project in Canada to review the current level of maturity and deliver a recommendation roadmap on how to move the organisation towards an optimised state of delivery.

Implementation

Maxica has an established industry tested process for benchmarking organisations against the CMMI scale. This approach follows a process of gathering and analysing project artifacts, standards, processes and policies, interviewing key project personal from VPs to engineers, inside and outside of the project team, and conducting surveys to capture the voice of the project team and users of the project services. The key themes assessed were:

General Awareness and adherence to the Project Framework
Management Control
Financial Management
Stakeholder Management
Risk Management
Organisational Governance
Resource Management
Vendor and Contract Management

The entire exercise was executed at pace and was completed and played backed to the client within a 6-week period.

Results and Outcomes

The outputs of the assessment were:

Playback Slide Deck: The client playback to the VP and his leadership team provide an opportunity to display the empirical data that had been captured with the professional PMO specialist interpretation of the survey feedback, artifacts and personnel. Recommendations on realistic improvements that could be achieved to promote greater maturity and success were provided.
Heatmaps: Provide a highly visible graphical representation of the ‘as is’ and ‘to be’ maturity state for the principal components in the Project Portfolio Management stack. This snapshot provided a powerful overview of where rapid improvements could be made and supported the playback recommendations.
Improvement Roadmap: This was a value driven summary of the key recommendations to deliver demonstrable benefits to Special Projects Team in the short, medium and long term. All roadmap recommendations were based on our real-world experience of optimising project best practice.

Conclusion

The feedback from the Vice President of the Special Projects Group was:

"Maxica’s PMO Maturity Assessment approach was comprehensive and insightful, identifying areas of strength and weakness and providing conclusive and relevant recommendations on how to mature and optimise our processes and services with the resources and budget we had available. A professional service from start to finish."

The benefits of the assessment were:

Cost Avoidance: The maturity assessment highlighted a number of areas where the programme could have incurred additional cost if it was not identified and addressed through the roadmap enhancements.
Voice Of The Customer: The data gathered provided a 360 view of project delivery, from the project team to stakeholders and other parts of the organisation who interact with Special Projects Team, enabling a comprehensive review of their strengths and weaknesses to be triangulated and verified.

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