Abstracts Education

Duplex project management maturity model (DPM3) key to organisational performance

by Robert Chee Choong Gan

Project management maturity models (PM3) are generic project management tools, designed to measure the approximate balance state of organisation’s capability and capacity to manage projects, programmes and portfolios. These tools are designed to be generic in form, free of technical jargons and structured at a level that is high enough for users to see the big picture and then adapt to tailor to their appropriate level of rigour thus serving diverse organisations. Studies in the last decade found mature project organisations outperform competitors which are not. There is also a tremendous increase in PM education and certification judging from PMI’s phenomenal 5-year growth of 25% to 553,150 members. There is also a 50% growth in Project Management Professionals (PMP) to 887,937 PMPs; PMI TODAY (Dec 2018 issue) which has since pass the 1 million mark. This positive growth trend however has not translated into PM3 growth uptake. Neither has research shown improvement in project success rates. To understand this dichotomy, this study examines the impediments to PM3 adoption, the continuing alarming project failure statistics in a PM contextual framework and whether the knowledge gained can provide insights for solutions to improve organisational performance. This study uses a mixed research method, involving interviews and surveys of 1,201 PM practitioners ranging from industries, commerce, academia to government. Participants were from 27 to 55 years of age where 623 (52%) had attended the PMP exam preparation boot camps and 578 (48%) senior participants attended the public PM intermediate and advanced level seminars/workshops conducted in Malaysia between 2011 to Mar 2019. To avoid the impediments experienced by past PM3 models, this study proposes DPM3 (Duplex Project Management Maturity Model) as a user-friendly novel approach to improve PM3 capability assessment following naturally occurring evidence at work to cater for different types and scale of projects. This provide an intuitive pathway that enable user friendly self-reflection, a shortcoming that has plague all the PM3s studied in this research.