P3M3 ® is the Portfolio, Programme and Project Management Maturity Model. If you run a PMO, or you’re responsible for how your organisation delivers change, you’ve probably come across it. It’s been around since 2005 and it remains one of the most widely recognised frameworks for assessing delivery capability in the UK and internationally.
The model was developed by the Office of Government Commerce (OGC), the same UK government body behind PRINCE2® and MSP®. It’s now maintained by PeopleCert through its AXELOS brand. The basic idea is straightforward: P3M3® gives you a structured way to assess how mature your organisation’s project, programme, and portfolio management practices actually are in practice.
This guide covers what P3M3® is, where it came from, how the five maturity levels and seven perspectives work, what’s changed recently, how it compares to alternatives like OPM3, Praxis, and CMMI, and how to use a PMO assessment to build a PMO improvement roadmap.
What is P3M3?
P3M3 stands for Portfolio, Programme and Project Management Maturity Model. It was originally developed by the UK Office of Government Commerce (OGC) and is now maintained by PeopleCert. It is used globally by organisations who want a structured picture of their delivery capability.
The model is built on the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) that was developed for the software industry in the late 1980s by Carnegie Mellon University. The OGC took their process maturity thinking, and applied it specifically to the project, programme and portfolio management space.Â
The maturity model was iterated in 2008, and updated again to version three in 2015. That’s still the current version as of early 2026, although PeopleCert (current owners of the model), have recently started referring to it as “PRINCE2 P3M3” on their website.
The model has three sub-models that can be used independently or together:
PfM3 (Portfolio Management)
PfM3 looks the organisational or department level and considers how effectively the organisation selects, prioritises, and governs its portfolio of programmes and projects.
PgM3 (Programme Management)
Programmes are coordinated groups of related projects and activities that combine to deliver major change. The PgM3 model looks at how well the organisation coordinates related projects to deliver strategic outcomes.
PjM3 (Project Management)
At the project level, PjM3 looks at the consistency and predictability of individual project delivery.
The separation is helpful. An organisation can be very good at running individual projects, while having no real grip on portfolio prioritisation. Conversely, the organisation may have great processes for deciding where to invest, only to be let down by the coordination of cross-project dependencies in clusters of coordinated projects. P3M3 allows you to assess each level independently, and means it is still a useful tool even for organisations who do not actively manage all three levels.
One thing that is worth pointing out: P3M3 is a diagnostic, not a scorecard. The point isn’t to chase a level 5 – it’s to understand where you are, and to build a forward looking plan to grow your maturity.
The Five Maturity Levels Explained
Level 1
Awareness
Ad-hoc processes. Delivery happens, but largely by heroics. No consistency across the organisation.
Level 2
Repeatable
Some processes are documented and followed, at least some of the time. Islands of good practice exist.
Level 3
Defined
Consistent, standardised processes across the organisation. People know what good looks like.
Level 4
Managed
Processes are measured and controlled. Data drives decisions.
Level 5
Optimised
Continuous improvement is embedded. The organisation actively learns and evolves.
In our experience, most organisations sit somewhere between Level 2 and Level 3. That’s not a criticism. Getting from 2 to 3 is genuinely hard. It’s the difference between having good practices that some people follow and having consistent practices that the whole organisation follows. That requires leadership commitment, cultural change, and sustained effort. You can’t just write a process document and call it done.
The jump from 3 to 4 is where things get strategically interesting. At Level 4, you can start making evidence-based commitments to the business about what the delivery function can achieve. You can challenge poor investment decisions with data instead of gut feel. You can demonstrate the PMO’s value in terms of outcomes, not just activity. That’s the level at which the PMO stops being seen as overhead and starts being seen as a strategic asset.
Not every organisation needs Level 5 across every perspective. A small professional services firm with a handful of projects has different needs from a government department running a multi-billion pound transformation portfolio. P3M3® is clear about this: you should target the maturity level that’s right for your context, not chase the highest number for the sake of it.
The Seven Process Perspectives
Organisational Governance
How well does the organisation maintain oversight and control of its portfolio, programmes, and projects?
Management Control
Are there consistent processes for planning, monitoring, and reporting across delivery?
Benefits Realisation
Can the organisation track and demonstrate the value its projects deliver?
Financial Management
Are investment decisions and cost controls rigorous and consistent?
Stakeholder Engagement
Are stakeholders identified, engaged, and managed proactively?
Risk Management
Are risks identified, assessed, and mitigated systematically?
Resource Management
Does the organisation understand and manage the capacity and capability needed to deliver?
These perspectives apply across all three domains (portfolio, programme, and project), so an assessment produces a matrix of scores: not a single number. That granularity helps the reader understand where to focus, rather than averaging out your strengths and weaknesses into a misleading headline score.
How PMOs Use P3M3 in Practice
A formal P3M3® assessment typically involves structured interviews with stakeholders at different levels, a review of documentation and processes, and facilitated workshops. The assessor looks at evidence across the seven perspectives, compares what they find against the maturity level descriptors, and produces a scored profile with recommendations.
Who can do a formal assessment? Only a PeopleCert Accredited Consulting Partner (ACP) with licensed P3M3® assessors. The full assessment framework is proprietary.
What about self-assessment? The OGC and later AXELOS used to offer a free online self-assessment tool hosted through The Stationery Office (TSO). That tool is no longer publicly available. You’ll find older versions of the self-assessment questionnaire floating around the internet (the V2 PDF is widely shared), but these aren’t official or maintained. PeopleCert’s current self-assessment offering is part of their consulting partner toolkit, not a public resource.
For organisations that don’t need a formal P3M3® certificate, there are other approaches worth considering. At HotPMO, our SPACE audit takes a different angle entirely. Where P3M3® asks “how mature are your processes?”, SPACE asks “is your PMO aligned to what your organisation actually needs?” It assesses the relationship between delivery capability, delivery aspiration, PMO capability, and PMO services. Maturity is part of that picture, but alignment is the central question. We’ll come back to that in more detail later.
However you decide to assess your delivery organisation, PMO leaders typically use maturity assessments for three things:
1
Making the Case for Investment
If you’ve ever tried to get budget for PMO improvement without evidence, you know how hard it is. A maturity assessment can be used to objectively show your leadership team where the gaps are, what those gaps mean for delivery performance, and what investment is needed to close them.
2
Setting a Credible Improvement Roadmap
Maturity assessments stop you from trying to fix everything at once. They give you a structured basis for prioritisation: focus on the perspectives that will have the most impact at your current level. And they give you a realistic target. If you’re at Level 2, aiming for Level 3 in your weakest areas over the next 12 months is a sensible plan. Aiming for Level 5 is not.
3
Tracking Progress Over Time
Repeat assessments (usually annual) create a maturity trajectory. That trajectory is powerful internally. It shows the board that the PMO is improving. It gives sponsors confidence that their investment is paying off. And it gives the PMO team (and the wider delivery organisation) a sense of progress, which matters for motivation and team morale.
The most useful assessments are the ones where people are honest. If everyone tells the assessor what they think they want to hear, the results are worthless. The whole point is to surface the gap between how delivery is supposed to work and how it actually works.
P3M3 vs Other Maturity Models
P3M3® isn’t the only maturity model out there. There are several alternatives worth knowing about, each with different strengths and trade-offs.
|
Model
|
Focus
|
Owner
|
Best For
|
|---|---|---|---|
|
P3M3 |
Portfolio, programme & project management maturity |
PeopleCert (AXELOS) |
Organisations that want a formally certified, externally benchmarked assessment. |
|
OPM3 |
Organisational project management maturity. Effectively retired by PMI in 2017. |
PMI |
Historical reference. Not actively maintained or supported. Third edition (2013) was the last. |
|
CMMI |
Process improvement across engineering & development |
ISACA |
Tech, engineering, and defence organisations |
|
Praxis Framework |
Free, open-source maturity model integrated with a body of knowledge and methodology. |
Praxis Framework Ltd |
Organisations that want a flexible, free model they can tailor and embed into day-to-day practice. |
|
SPACE (HotPMO) |
Outcome-focused assessment of PMO effectiveness across delivery capability, PMO capability, PMO services, and delivery aspiration. |
HotPMO |
PMOs seeking a practical, diagnostic that connects capability gaps directly to a 12-month roadmap/improvement plan. |
P3M3® is the most widely recognised maturity model in the UK. It’s framework-agnostic, it covers portfolio, programme, and project management independently, and most senior stakeholders in both public and private sector will have heard of it. That recognition has value, particularly if you need to satisfy a procurement requirement or benchmark against other organisations who’ve used the same model.
But recognition and usefulness aren’t the same thing. P3M3® will tell you how mature your processes are. It won’t tell you whether those processes are pointed in the right direction. An organisation can score well on maturity and still have a PMO that’s completely misaligned with what leadership actually needs it to do.
From Assessment to Roadmap
Whether you use P3M3®, SPACE, Praxis, or something else entirely, the assessment is only valuable if it leads somewhere. Too many organisations treat the assessment as the deliverable. It isn’t. The deliverable is the improvement plan that comes out of it.
The principles below apply regardless of which assessment approach you’ve used. The details will differ (a P3M3® roadmap will be structured around perspectives and maturity levels; a SPACE roadmap will be structured around the alignment between PMO capability, PMO services, and delivery aspiration) but the discipline of turning findings into action is the same.
Agree a direction of travel
Based on the assessment results, agree with your leadership team which areas to prioritise and what direction of travel looks like. If you’ve used P3M3®, that means choosing which perspectives and sub-models to focus on. If you’ve used SPACE, it means focusing on the gaps between current capability and delivery aspiration. Either way, aim for realistic progress over 12 months, not a leap to perfection overnight.
Be Specific
‘Improve risk management’ is not a roadmap item. ‘Implement a standard risk assessment process for all projects above £250k by Q2, with monthly portfolio-level risk reporting to the steering committee by Q3’ is a roadmap item. If your organisation uses OKRs, structure your improvement plan around them. The objective is the outcome you’re working towards; the key results are the measurable evidence that you’re getting there. The discipline forces clarity, and it gives you something concrete to report on when the steering committee asks how the PMO improvement programme is going.
Own the implementation
The roadmap needs owners, timelines, and success measures. If you leave it as a list of recommendations with no accountability, nothing will change. The PMO should own the roadmap delivery, with regular progress reviews built into the governance cycle.
Reassess annually
Maturity improvement is not a one-off project. The organisations that get genuine, sustained value from this approach are the ones that commit to annual reassessment. Each year’s assessment shows what’s improved, what hasn’t, and where the goalposts have moved. It creates a trajectory that leadership can see and trust. This is how our PMO SuccessHub is structured: the SPACE audit runs annually, and everything else in the SuccessHub year (training, expert calls, Vault templates) flows from what the assessment finds.
One thing we see repeatedly: organisations skipping assessment, and going straight to buying training courses and deploying new PPM tools. Training and tools are important, but they’re inputs, not outcomes. If you don’t know what problem you’re solving, you’ll spend money without making progress. Start with the assessment. Then spend the money where it counts.
What does a P3M3 assessment cost?
Very few providers publish a figure. A P3M3 assessment is scoped work rather than a product, so the price follows decisions you make before anyone starts.
Six things move the number.
How much of P3M3 you assess. The model has seven perspectives and three sub-models. Assessing portfolio, programme and project management across all seven perspectives is a much larger piece of work than assessing one sub-model against the three or four perspectives where you already suspect a problem.
How many parts of the organisation are in scope. A single PMO supporting one directorate is one set of interviews and one evidence trail. A federated model with regional or divisional PMOs multiplies both.
The depth of evidence. A facilitated self-assessment, where your own people score the organisation with an assessor guiding the conversation, costs less than an evidence-based assessment where the assessor reviews artefacts, samples projects and tests what the documentation actually shows.
Whether you want a formal accredited assessment. Only a PeopleCert Accredited Consulting Partner can deliver an accredited P3M3 assessment, and only using licensed assessors. That restriction is the structural reason the accredited route sits above an in-house review on price, and the certificate at the end is what it buys. A review that uses the P3M3 structure without accreditation is a different service at a different price, and it produces no certified rating.
Whether benchmarking is included. Comparison against a wider dataset is one of the reasons organisations choose P3M3 over an in-house framework, and access to that data is not automatic.
What you receive at the end. A maturity rating is one output. A prioritised improvement roadmap with sequencing and owners is another, and it is usually where the value sits.
Duration is a better guide than price
Because scope varies so much, duration is the more useful published comparator. Wellingtone, an accredited partner, publishes a typical duration for a P3M3 audit of “from around 9 days”, against “as little as 3 days” for its own lighter-weight alternative.
Nine consulting days is a reasonable planning assumption for a full accredited assessment of a single organisation. Treat it as the floor for the formal route rather than the average, and expect a federated or multi-sub-model scope to run longer.
What to ask for when you request a quote
A quote is only comparable if the scope is stated. Ask for these in writing.
- Which sub-models and which of the seven perspectives are included
- Which organisational units are in scope, and how many interviews that implies
- Whether it is a facilitated self-assessment or an evidence-based assessment
- Whether the assessor is PeopleCert-licensed and whether a certified rating is produced
- Whether benchmarking data is included, and against what population
- What documents you receive, and whether an improvement roadmap is part of the fee
- Whether a re-assessment is priced now or later
If two quotes differ widely, the difference usually sits in the depth of evidence and the number of units in scope rather than in the day rate.
Who can carry out a formal assessment
P3M3 is owned by PeopleCert. A formal, certified P3M3 assessment must be carried out by a PeopleCert Accredited Consulting Partner using licensed assessors. Any organisation may use the P3M3 structure to frame an internal maturity review, and many do, but that review does not produce an accredited rating and should not be described as one.
HotPMO is not a PeopleCert Accredited Consulting Partner and we do not carry out P3M3 assessments. If you need an accredited P3M3 rating, an accredited partner is the only route to it.
A lower-cost alternative
If the question behind “what does it cost” is really “is this worth doing”, a shorter review can answer that on its own. HotPMO’s PMO Assessment looks at governance and process, people and capability, tools and reporting, strategic alignment, portfolio prioritisation and maturity benchmarking, and produces a prioritised view of where the gaps are. It will tell you whether a formal P3M3 rating would add anything you do not already know. It is a separate diagnostic: it is not a P3M3 assessment, it produces no P3M3 rating, and it is not a step towards one.
Our assessments start from £3,899 + VAT. The exact figure depends on the size of your PMO and the scope you need, and we agree a fixed price before any work begins.
How HotPMO Can Help
PMO assessment is where most of our client relationships start. We’ve worked with organisations across insurance, retail, finance, rail, and digital sectors, at every stage of maturity. Some are establishing their first PMO. Others are trying to get a mature but stalled PMO moving again.
Our SPACE audit (Strategic Alignment & Capability Evaluation) is our assessment framework. It’s informed by established models including P3M3®, but it’s designed to be practical, proportionate, and directly connected to action. We assess delivery capability, PMO capability, PMO services, and delivery aspiration. We look at the relationship between those four things. And we produce a clear report with a 12-month improvement roadmap that you can actually implement.
We don’t just hand over a score. We work alongside your team through the assessment, the roadmap, and the implementation, to ensure the improvements actually land and stick.
PMO Health Check & Maturity Assessment
A structured diagnostic built around six dimensions. Clear findings → practical roadmap.
PMO SuccessHub
For PMOs ready to put their assessment findings into action with ongoing expert support and a ready-to-deploy toolkit.
PMO Consultancy
For organisations that need hands-on support through the assessment and improvement journey.
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P3M3® is a registered trade mark of PeopleCert. This article is published for information and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or produced under licence from PeopleCert.
