Assessing Project Maturity Level in Botswana Railways

Abstract

Efficiency and effectiveness of project management is critical to the execution of projects within an organization. In the current ever-changing environment, organizations have come to employ project management as a critical tool to outperform their competitors. The maturity of its project management has to be determined since it is directly correlated with project management excellence, retaining projects and getting a return on investment. The main objective of this study was to assess project management maturity level of Botswana Railways (BR). The study focused on the business units and subsidiary companies responsible for project management in the organization. It therefore investigated the research variables critical to the project management capability areas used to determine the project management maturity of an organization. The researcher evaluated various internationally adopted project management maturity models after an extensive literature review. A project management matrix developed by the Office of Government (UK) was used as benchmarking tool to determine the maturity level of BR. The maturity level of BR was found to be at on the second level of the maturity ladder (Level 2: "Planned"). The study subsequently details what it means to be at this level. The results of the data analysis indicated that BR has the opportunity to improve project management maturity and a number of recommendations are made in this regard.