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

Measuring Project Management Process and Practice Maturity

The best practices, tools, templates, and processes described in this section have been integrated to design a system for measuring process and practice maturity. This system is the major input to the CPIM described later in this chapter.

The Process Quality Matrix and Zone Map

The Process Quality Matrix (PQM) and the Zone Map shown in Figure 15-1 are the key data collection tools for CPIM.

My version of the PQM consists of 12 columns and one row for each process or process step. Note here that the PQM is a very robust tool. Any process can be represented in the rows that define the PQM. In my consulting experiences the process steps for the client's systems development life cycle have been a common application.

In the example shown in Figure 15-1, the first 10 columns are the 10 prioritized critical factors (CF) that cause IT project failure as defined by the Standish Group in their report CHAOS 2010. This list should always reflect the latest CHAOS report. The list of CFs is usually the Standish Group–prioritized list of reasons for project failure, but there are other options, too. So these 10 columns of the PQM are robust, as is the number of columns. The 11^th column contains a correlation factor that is computed from the data in the first 10 columns of the PQM, which will be discussed later. The 12^th column will contain a maturity level factor computed from a maturity assessment. The rows define process steps (such ...