John,
You make several assertions in your reply that I would like to respond to.
First, you claim at length, that the Yes/No questions provide a “high-level assessment” only and are “not designed nor intended to identify bona fide capabilities and actionable improvement options.” Although the OPM3 does discuss this assessment as a high-level view, the results of the 151 questions drive the direction of everything else. Granted, it does suggest that the self-assessment tool provided in the OPM3 is only one way to identify the organizations general position on the organizational PM maturity and that organizations may develop others, however, I can’t imagine many organizations taking the time and energy to come up with another assessment instrument.
Moreover, in your reply you discuss a “Capability Assessment” in which the capabilities of a best practice are assessed. Although the OPM3 discusses this capability assessment (Appendix E), it is a paper-based method of “evaluating” each capability and provides little, if any, evaluation criteria. How can one do an assessment when you don’t have criteria against which to evaluate?
Now, these two assessment concerns bring up another major issue in the product. For a true maturity assessment to be conducted, you need three things:
All three of these things allow the organizations to bring a consistent, standardized approach to the assessment process. Without consistency in any one of these, I might be conducting my assessment differently than you will be conducting yours and probably differently than John at Company X and Mary at Company Y. If we have all used a different method to assess our respective organizations, how can we benchmark ourselves to a defined maturity model and have results that are even remotely comparable to each other?
As well, you mention that the OPM3, does in fact, link projects with business strategy. Actually, no it doesn’t. In only one instance in the entire document does it discuss this link and that is at the start of the document in the Executive Summary. Nowhere else in the entire document is there any reference to this linkage. Having a handful of capabilities, as you suggest, does not provide the user with a clear link to choosing the right projects or bridging the gap between projects and organizational strategy.
Finally, given that you were one of the key developers of the OPM3, you have a great deal of background into the development of the product and why it was moulded the way it was. The average user of the product does not and really should not need to know this information to use the product successfully. Ultimately, PMI is marketing a product that simply does not live up to the all of the marketing hype it has been given.