Browsing by Author "Lehtinen, Mirkka"
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- Assessment of Project Management Practices in Organizations
Helsinki University of Technology | Master's thesis(2005) Lehtinen, MirkkaMany organizations have realized that project management can also be regarded as a means to improve their overall business performance and due to that they are more interested in developing their project management practices. Before this development is possible, organizations need to know where their development efforts should be targeted. This thesis studied 13 models that are created for assessing organizations' project management practices and used three customer cases to survey how organizations see one assessment model. The objectives were to find out what are the benefits that an assessment brings to an organization and what assessment areas should be included in a project management assessment model. Another concrete objective was to find out how organizations see the model used in the customer survey. The studied models provide four different purposes for reasons why organizations should use an assessment model. They are: learning, definition, improvement and commitment. These purposes are very similar to the benefits that the surveyed organizations named after the assessment was performed. The purposes and benefits are all related to direct impacts of the assessment, i.e. to the results that organizations can get directly after the assessment. They do not respond to how the assessment could affect to the organizations' performance also in the long-term. Six different assessment areas could be identified from the studied models: 1) PM processes, 2) management of multiple projects, 3) projects' consistency to strategy and organizational goals, 4) organizational environment, 5) organizational development and learning, and 6) management of people. The surveyed organizations were not able to define what areas should or should not be assessed, they rely on the expertise of the assessor in terms of determining what assessment areas are most suitable for their organization.