Project Management Maturity Model: An Empirical investigation across several industries

Project Management Maturity Model: An Empirical investigation across several industries

Gupta, A.

Van Beers, C. (mentor)
Filippov, S. (mentor)
Mooi, H. (mentor)
Kwee, Z. (mentor)

Technology, Policy and Management

Technology, Strategy, & Entrepreneurship

Management of Technology

2012-06-29

With the continuous rising competitiveness, the need for improving performance has become vital for organizations to stay in the market. In order to improve the performance, one first needs to evaluate the output of a process or procedure on basis of efficiency. Having it measured, the processes or procedures could be modified such that it increases the output, efficiency or effectiveness. For this measuring, a tool known as maturity model has been developed over the past years. Despite the existence of many project management maturity models, several shortcomings and lacking can still be found, such as ignoring the human and organizational aspects as one of the many examples. This results in the main research question of this report: “How can the existing maturity models be further enhanced and applied effectively across several industries?” This question is further divided into three sub-questions, where the first sub-question focuses on the current state of the project management maturity models and the project management elements a model should possess, which will assist in making a new project management maturity model. The second sub-question delves deeper in the various project management elements (competencies) and identifies commonalities and dependencies of the maturity levels of these competencies. The last sub-question serves the purpose of testing the applicability of the newly developed maturity model. The methodology employed to collect the data is a multiple case study with multiple resources. The quantitative approach helped gathering empirics by applying the model on various organizations. Followed by a detailed analysis, a qualitative approach was used to validate the model and its findings, to minimize biases in the research conclusions. Besides thoroughly analysing the existing project management maturity models on their unique features and shortcomings, this study provided a newly developed maturity model which addressed these shortcomings. The application of the model on various organizations and the followed data analysis together with the validation interviews provided some interesting findings like: - The categorization of various project management competencies targeting a broader set of competencies (especially soft and societal factors). The categorization, helped finding out what elements within the field of project management were given the most/least importance and what the correlations were amongst these elements - Besides one overall maturity level, unlike existing maturity models, this maturity model due to its unique way of calculating provides four overall maturity levels. Each of the four overall maturity levels, represent one of the four categories, where various elements are grouped based on their properties. This gives a broader overview of the strengths and weaknesses of the organization, such that those weaknesses can be easily identified and worked upon. - Although maturity models in general get easily influenced by subjectivity and different opinions of respondents, the questionnaire used for this model was found to make things more objective due to the clear descriptive answers. Besides contributing to the existing academic literature, this study also provided empirical evidence on the way various project management competencies are perceived and might need extra focus. The empirics and recommendations provided by this study could then be used for further for further research or be directly applied in practice.

Project Management
Maturity Models
Maturity levels
Competitive advantage

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:2668f074-a378-495b-8b3b-e4edab0cc8ea

Campus only

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2012 Gupta, A.