Project Excellence Baseline for Achieving Excellence in Projects and Programmes

What defines whether a project or programme is “good” or “bad”?

When we’re striving for excellence in the execution of our projects and programmes, what do we mean? IPMA has given its extended definition in the PEB, the Project Excellence Baseline.

This model is based on the well-known EFQM model, but is adapted to the field of project- and programme management and after over 10 years of use has been adapted to the model we’re using now.

Table of Content:

Foreword

Executive summary

Table of Contents  11

List of figures  14

List of tables  15

Abbreviations and acronyms  16

Terms and definitions  17

1. Introduction  21

1. 1. IPMA PEB links to IPMA OCB and IPMA ICB  24

2. Purposes and intended users  27

2.1. Purpose of the IPMA Project Excellence Baseline  27

2.2. Typical user groups of the IPMA PEB  28

3. The project in its context  33

3.1. What is a project?  33

3.1.1. The project in an organization  33

3.1.2. The project as a temporary organization  34

3.1.3. Processes in a project  35

3.2. A project in its external context  36

3.3. A project in its organisational context  38

3.3.1. Organisational context  38

3.3.2. Project governance  38

3.3.3. The project in the context of a programme and portfolio  39

4. Introducing project excellence  43

4.1. The concept of excellence  43

4.2. The concept of project excellence  44

4.3. Continuous improvement as a foundation for excellence  45

4.4. The role of sustainability  47

4.5. The role of leadership  50

4.6. The link between competence and excellence  51

5. Introduction to the Project Excellence Model  55

5.1. Principles behind the model design  55

5.2. Structure of the model  56

5.3. Areas of the model and interpretation of the overall results  57

5.4. Interactions between the areas of the model  60

5.5. Business value delivery using IPMA PEM  61

5.6. The model criteria  62

6. Assessment of project excellence  71

6.1. Purposes and approaches to the project excellence

Assessment  71

6.2. Assessment of project excellence in a project life cycle  75

6.3. Scope of the assessment in projects, programmes and portfolios  77

6.4. The role and competences of project excellence assessors  82

6.5. The assessment process  84

6.6. Scoring approach 86

Annex A: Description of the Project Excellence Model  91

A. People & Purpose  92

B. Processes & Resources  102

C. Project Results  107

Annex B: Scoring tables for the IPMA Project Excellence Model  117

Scoring table for People & Purpose and Processes & Resources areas  118

Scoring table for Customer, Project Team and Other Stakeholder Satisfaction criteria

119

Scoring table for Project Results criteria 120

Annex C: The IPMA Global Project Excellence Award assessment and its benefits

121

The IPMA Global Project Excellence Award assessment 122

The IPMA Global Project Excellence Award benefits 125

References 127