Organizations today need to provide better products and services. The issues they face require integrated approaches and effective management of their resources. Maturity models help integrate traditionally separate organizational functions, define process improvement goals and priorities, provide guidance for quality processes, and provide a benchmark for evaluating the current processes. The benefits management approach emerges as a complement to traditional management practices and proposes a continuous mapping of benefits, implementing and monitoring intermediate results. Based on a case study, it is shown how a set of business objectives can be obtained from the identification, structuring, and monitoring of business benefits, supported by information technology enablers and organizational transformations and by a certain level of maturity. The authors state that the focus of a successful investment is not only on the implementation of technology, but mainly on changes in organizational performance and business efficiency through process improvements and changes in the way of working.
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All organizations are interested in finding ways in which they can ensure their long-term viability, whether they are private firms looking to maximize their shareholder value, or public sector and not-for-profit organizations seeking to maximize their effectiveness. Gaining a competitive advantage over competitors has been the focus of the organizations since a long time because only a competitive advantage can assure the long-term existence of the organization (Jugdev & Mathur, 2006). Firms that have captured competitive advantage (Porter, 1984) are attempting to maintain their competitiveness by increasing knowledge and managing that knowledge. In a competitive environment, organizations need flexibility to meet customers’ demands, by offering customized and high-quality products and services. Organizations have made significant investments in Information Systems and Technology (IS/IT) projects, hoping to obtain competitive advantages, growth and productivity improvement. Project success and failure is one of the most discussed topics in Project Management (Adzmi & Hassan, 2018; Flyvbjerg & Budzier, 2011; Holgeid & Jørgensen, 2020). While managing projects, organizing people and work in an appropriate way is a key success factor. The functional organization, with a distinct hierarchy is being left behind in the modern business world while other organizational structures enabling higher flexibility are becoming more and more dominant (Dinsmore & Cooke-Davies, 2006). For organizations to succeed in the global business competition today, it is necessary that they produce a high standard of performance.
Managing projects competently is not something that a company can achieve by carrying out a few projects, but essentially through its level of organizational maturity (Fabro & Tonchia, 2018). The company, by recognizing its skills and capabilities in project management, as well as its strengths and weaknesses in various dimensions, allows the company to develop the necessary processes for highly efficient project management (Spalek, 2015).
Maturity models became an essential tool in assessing organization’s current capabilities and helping them to implement change and improvements in a structured way (Jia et al., 2013). Maturity model is a set of characteristics, attributes, indicators, or patterns that represent progression and achievement in a specific domain or discipline (Caralli et al., 2012). Basically, the purpose of the maturity model is to provide a framework for improving an organization’s business result by assessing the organization’s strengths and weaknesses, enabling comparisons with similar organizations, and a measure of the correlation between an organization’s (Combe, 1998; Ibbs & Kwak, 2000). There are several reasons why organizations might choose to use a maturity model to assess their current performance, such as:
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Justifying investment in portfolio, programme or project management improvements.
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Gaining recognition of service quality to support proposals.
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Gaining a better understanding of their strengths and weakness to enable improvement to happen.
Maturity model is an important element of strategic planning as it provides a methodology, a road map to determine and compress the gaps in resources and quality (Kerzner, 2005). Working with different types of projects within an organization requires standard models to deliver successful future projects repeatedly, improve both the quality of future projects and gain knowledge and learn from past mistakes.