OPM3
Also known as: Organizational Project Management Maturity Model
PMI's framework assessing an organization's project management maturity across knowledge, assessment, and improvement domains.
The Organizational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3) is PMI's framework for assessing and improving an organization's capability to deliver strategy through projects, programmes, and portfolios. First published in 2003 with subsequent editions in 2008 and 2013 (third edition), OPM3 provides a self-assessment instrument identifying the presence of best practices across organizational project management domains. The model was withdrawn from active publication when PMI absorbed Disciplined Agile (2019) and restructured its organizational standards portfolio, but remains historically significant as the first widely-adopted organizational PM maturity framework and influences successor PMI products. OPM3 sat alongside SEI's CMMI as a maturity-model exemplar; it differed by focusing on strategy execution through portfolio and programme management rather than software-process maturity.
Core components
- Three interrelated elements: Knowledge (best-practice content), Assessment (measuring current state), Improvement (sequenced capability development)
- Organizational Project Management (OPM) framework integrating project, programme, and portfolio management
- Best-practice library across knowledge areas
- Five-stage capability progression for each best practice (standardize, measure, control, continuously improve, and a maturity dimension)
- Self-assessment instrument and OPM3 Online or assessment-tool variants
- Connection to PMI's Standard for Portfolio Management and Standard for Program Management
Primary use case
Organizational project management maturity assessment for large enterprises and government agencies; input to strategic project management improvement programmes and PMO establishment; consultant-led organizational diagnostic and benchmark; academic reference in PM maturity research; foundation for PMI's subsequent organizational guidance including the post-2019 Disciplined Agile and Standard for Organizational Project Management.
Common criticisms
- Maturity-model frameworks generally have been substantially criticized — Pfeffer and Sutton's 'Hard Facts' (2006) and academic researchers including Mullaly, Williams, and Crawford have challenged the assumption that higher-maturity organizations actually deliver better project outcomes, with empirical evidence at best mixed and confounded by organizational size and industry
- OPM3's specific construct validity has not been independently established to the standard the maturity-claims premise would require
- the self-assessment methodology produces social-desirability bias in scoring
- data-collection burden is substantial and benchmark comparison weak because the population of OPM3-assessed organizations is small and unrepresentative
- consulting markets around OPM3 produced commercial incentive for high-cost assessment-and-improvement engagements with weakly demonstrated ROI
- PMI's withdrawal of OPM3 from active publication after 2019 indicates the institution's own assessment that the framework needed substantial reworking
- the relationship to CMMI has been awkward, with organizations unclear which framework applies to which scope.
Lineage
- Child of
- PMBOK Guide
- Siblings
- P3M3