Abstract
Project management plays an important role in the competitive scenario, and achieved in the 1990s the status of methodology (Carvalho & Rabechini, Jr., 2005). Nowadays, there are more than 100,000 practitioners that earned the Project Management Professional (PMP®) certification from the Project Management Institute (PMI). This indicator highlights the increasing interest in project management area, especially in the IT companies, which are one of the top five industries in PMI’s membership numbers (PMI, 2005). The widely spread framework proposed by PMI called Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBoK), now in the third edition (PMBoK, 1996, 2000, 2004), has been adopted by several kinds of project-driven organization (PMI, 2004). PMBoK clusters the main project management best practices in nine key areas. Nevertheless, a research carried out by Standish Group (2003) showed high failure level in IT project in North America. The research involved about 13.522 projects, of which only 34% can be considered a success. The main causes for IT projects failure were related to user’s commitment, manager support and requirement definition. It is important to emphasize that, regarding the project success measure in historical perspective, the success rate improved if compared to the first similar research carried out in 1999, which was just 16%. Based on this scenario, this chapter presents the main organizational project management models in order to help companies to upgrade project performance.
TopBackground
Several project management models had been discussed in the academic literature concerning its effectiveness and efficiency. The models focus on project efficiency, balancing scope expectations and the available resources (Carvalho & Rabechini, Jr., 2005). However, the project management efficiency models, such as PMBoK framework, cannot provide a standard benchmark for project management competences and maturity enhancing. Thus, in order to extend the efficiency models to an effectiveness perspective, several PM organizational models have been proposed.
Nevertheless, project management efficiency models focus on the project and not on organizational issues. As Engwall (2003, p. 789) states “no project is an island” and to achieve success in this area it is important to fit project management best practices to organizational environment.
On the other hand, the effectiveness issue encompasses the organizational project management models, which promotes the strategic alignment between this area and the organizational vision. It means providing an appropriate strategic alignment and portfolio analysis, project management organizational structure, methodology and project manager carrier (Carvalho & Rabechini, Jr., 2005; Carvalho, Laurindo, & Pessoa, 2003, 2005; Rabechini, Jr., Gelamo, & Carvalho, 2005; Shimizu, Carvalho, & Laurindo, 2006).
Key Terms in this Chapter
CMM I (CMM-I1, CMM-I2): A model, which has been enhanced in two dimensions: scope dimension and evaluation dimension . The CMM-Il incorporated both approaches, the traditional (called staged CMM) and the maturity profile (called continuous CMM).
Project Life Cycle: Common processes identify in PMMM, level 2, which could be broken into five phases: embryonic; executive management acceptance; line management acceptance; growth; and maturity.
OPM3: The Organizational Project Management Maturity Model is an organizational model, proposed by PMI in 2003, that encompasses five groups of processes, four improvement stages, and three constructs in order to drive organizations to achieve maturity in project management.