Maturity assessments: Seeing yourself through a different lens

What is a maturity assessment?

Let’s start with what a maturity assessment is not.  It’s not a test of your project and programme managers’ capabilities. It aims to understand, assess and benchmark how your organisation undertakes project, programme and portfolio management.  

How will I know if my organisation is at a low level of maturity?

Symptoms may vary, but typically you would see ambitious strategies that cannot be delivered, and poor alignment of change initiatives to business strategy. Studies have shown that as many as 38% of programmes do not have an established link between their objectives and organisational strategy.  It can come as a surprise when businesses scratch the surface and find that several projects can be duplicating, competing or at odds with their objectives.  

Other symptoms could include: 

• late delivery
• budget overspends
• failure to deliver expected outcomes and benefits
• inconsistent reporting and management information
• limited oversight of interdependencies
• lack of centralised control of finances and resources

What is being assessed?

Your entire organisation does not need to be mature in PPM disciplines. You might exclude some areas, such as Finance and Administration. Including the whole organisation in your assessment may very well ensure a low score. An evaluation should focus in on those areas responsible for the delivery of your change initiatives.

What are the benefits of a maturity assessment?

There are many benefits to conducting a portfolio and programme maturity assessment. First, the potential to reduce project cost losses from 28% to 2%.  Transport for London achieved estimated savings of £1bn through assessing and increasing its maturity level.

Assessment will also help you understand your current capability to deliver change initiatives and inform decisions relating to risk exposure.  You can compare different parts of the organisation to each other, or the business itself with peers or industry standards. This would help you assess where mature portfolio and programme management capabilities will have the most significant impact.

Assessment can direct you to take action, redirect resources, look for external help or re-design your portfolio or programme for better results.

What can I expect from a maturity assessment?

The first step in an assessment is to agree on its scope. What are the priorities for review against the defined elements?  

The second step is to interview key stakeholders and review portfolio/programme documentation to identify and assess critical risks.  A maturity assessment tool is generally used to help capture this information. The tool provides a clear RAG status for each of the elements and provides a summary of the review.  

The third step is to score each area and provide supporting information.  Risks and recommended actions are captured, and stakeholders should agree on how to put changes in place.  

A full maturity assessment is typically completed within six to eight weeks, dependent on the scope of the assessment.  Scoring levels of maturity differ depending on the method used. They are generally expressed as ad-hoc, immature, established, mature or optimised, or similar.

Very few organisations will ever need to obtain a Level 5 maturity level. What is important is to define what maturity level is suitable for your organisation to maximise your investment, identify quick wins and create a medium-term plan to get there.

How can we help you?

PwC has worked with many organisations to assess how they deliver business change. We have distilled our experience locally and globally to create a methodology that reduces risk, time and effort for you and your business.

If you would like to find out more about maturity assessments and running one in your organisation, we would be delighted to talk to you.