What is Organizational Process Assets In PMBOK 5th Edition

You will find Enterprise Environmental Factors (EEFs) and Organizational Process Assets (OPAs) very frequently while going through the PMBOK5th edition and therefore firm understanding of the topics is required. Here we will discuss the Organizational Process Assets.

Asset: Any tangible or intangible thing that can be owned or controlled to produce value for us is called an Asset for us. For example my house which I use to live is an asset for me, and so my car is which I use to commute etc.

Similarly an organization has assets in terms of process policies and knowledge base which becomes mature with the time. Organization invests in creating all these process, policies and knowledge bases so that it can help the organization wherever it is needed and thus called Organizational Process Assets.

Let me give a real example: One of my friend in my last organization was assigned a finance related project and he had to develop a detailed risk management plan. He was not experienced enough in doing that and therefore he approached me. I asked him to go to our company’s knowledge base and get one template for the same and then develop his own. And after few days I saw his name in one of the best PM of that quarter. See how helpful the knowledgebase can be for anyone who needs it and that’s why we call it Organization Process Assets.

Organizational Process Assets has important role in project’s outcome and with the time it grows and becomes more and more mature.

As per PMBOK the Organizational Process Assets is divided in two categories

1. Processes and procedures
2. Corporate knowledge base

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A New Knowledge Area “Stakeholders” in PMBOK5: Not A Surprise

It is a well known fact that Project manager's spend their time on communicating with stakeholders. On an average 90% of the time are spent on communication. For success of any project a lot depends on how information is distributed among right stakeholders on time and necessary change requests are initiated before the situation goes out of hand. In PMBOK 4 , listing and managing stakeholders were part of Communication knowledge area. Since the dynamic nature of stakeholders presence needed a greater emphasis on how to manage stakeholders in an effective way. This may be the reason why PMI though of including “Stakeholders” as an individual knowledge area.

It is very important for a PM to identify the right stakeholders for right information at right time through out the life of a project and distribute information accordingly. There is no point to give information to stakeholder no longer impacting the success of the project and missing the important stakeholder who was not so active during the planning phase but becomes active in execution phase. Inability to identify the stakeholders can result in failure of project or not meeting the deadline. The importance of this process resulted in addition of a new Knowledge area called “Stakeholders”.

The processes in this knowledge area are apparently following:

1. Identify Stakeholders ( Initiating )
2. Plan Stakeholder Management ( Planning)
3. Manage Stakeholder Engagement ( Executing )
4. Control Stakeholder Management ( Monitoring and Controlling )

It is needless to say as most of the processes these processes are also iterative and PMs should re-asses the validity of stakeholder lists on regular basis.

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