Effective Project Management: Traditional, Agile, Extreme, Sixth Edition

Establishing a PSO

When you are planning for a PSO, four critical questions must be answered. One of them deals with defining a desired future for your organization's PSO — the goal, so to speak. To reach that goal, however, you have to assess where you currently are with respect to it. The answer to that question identifies a gap between the current state and the future state. That gap is removed through the implementation plan for your PSO. This is the definition of a standard gap analysis. The four major questions, then, arranged chronologically, are as follows:

• Where are you?
• Where are you going?
• How will you get there?
• How well did you do?

Before you attempt to answer these questions, you need a foundation for answering them. The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University provides just the foundation you need. Its five-level model, described in the next section, also gives you a foundation on which you can plan for the further growth and maturation of your PSO.

PSO Stages of Maturity Growth

Over the past 20+ years, SEI has developed and maintained a maturity model for software engineering. It has gained wide support and become the de facto standard of the software development community. The model was originally called the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) and more recently the Capability Maturity Model Integrated (CMMI). It has recently been adapted to project management in the form of a Project Management Maturity Model (PMMM). I will use the five ...