Benchmarking is a method of measuring your organization against others in a certain industry, organization, function, or process. The purpose of benchmarking is to provide a common focus on measurement against a standard of excellence and a target for improving performance.

Benefits of benchmarking include:

• Determine how well you compare to others
• Improve beyond the bounds of industry standards
• Prioritize opportunities for improvement
• Locate your performance gaps
• Promote process "ownership" in your organization
• Increase openness about relative strengths and weaknesses
• Learn from others and increase confidence in developing and applying new approaches
• Expand participation and motivation of staff in change programs
• Increase willingness to share solutions to common problems and build consensus about what is needed to accommodate changes
• Increase collaboration and understanding of the interactions within and between organizations

We use the OPM3 Standard with other tools to facilitate benchmarking. The OPM3 Standard was developed originally between 1998 and 2003 by a grassroots volunteer effort sponsored by the Project Management Institute. In May of 1998, members of the PMI Standards Committee including the CEO of OPM Experts LLC, John Schlichter, met to design a portfolio of project management standards. At that time the committee decided to explore the possibility of developing a maturity model for project management in organizations. Schlichter was assigned the task of analyzing this idea and presenting findings. At the next meeting the analysis was presented, and the committee chartered the program to develop a maturity model and tasked Schlichter with originating, growing, and directing that team, which he did until the OPM3 prototype was delivered to PMI four years later. The team grew to over 800 volunteers from 35 countries, analyzed 27 different maturity models, and deployed primary research surveys to 30,000 people as the basis of developing a global standard which was published in 2003 and later accredited and sanctioned by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

The original mission of the program to develop OPM3 was to create a maturity model that provides methods for assessing and developing the capabilities that enhance an organization’s ability to deliver projects successfully, consistently, and predictably in order to accomplish the strategies of the organization and improve organizational effectiveness. The effort focused on identifying ways to make capable within an organization the Organizational Project Management processes (of project management, program management, and portfolio management) as well as ways to cultivate the culture and environment wherein such processes are performed. A method for making such processes capable was delineated in stages as Standardization, Measurement, Control, and (Continuous) Improvement. These stages were abbreviated “SMCI”. Through implementation of this method an organization would define and cause the requisite capability unique to its own environment, and characterize its progress in the implementation of this method in terms of maturity. The model was designed as a modular architecture to allow an organization to develop any individual process or combination of processes from the domains of project, program, and portfolio management (making the model flexible and scalable).

The model was developed to be applicable to most organizations most of the time, where the term “organization” meant any goal directed entity, whether a team, department, business unit, or enterprise. While one organization’s requisite statistical process capability could naturally or legitimately differ from another organization’s requirements, all organizations would achieve their own requisite capability by implementing the steps of SMCI that are characterized in four stages or levels. Thus two different organizations could both be assessed as having achieved the Control agenda to produce different statistical process capabilities respectively. Any two organizations could be assessed as having the same level of maturity while denoting different process capabilities respectively, enabling the comparison of organizations by both maturity level and capability, i.e. benchmarking. It became clear that a key capability is the capacity to recognize which Organizational Project Management (OPM) processes to make capable and how capable to make them in order to cope with one’s environment.  That is, greater complexity, volatility, and uncertainty require greater Organizational Project Management maturity.

OPM Experts LLC is the leading provider of OPM3-related professional services. We can broker and facilitate benchmarking that turns information into knowledge and knowledge into action. Contact us today.