Importance of Organizational Process Assets

Good practices come from experience…..and experience indeed a precious resource, even when it is not your own.

For any projects – management team, as a first and foremost activity, need to search the historical information regarding similar projects executed in their organization. If the project is in entirely new, then they need to collect information regarding similar projects from other sources.

Starting a project from scratch without using any information from past projects executed by your organization or similar projects executed by other organization(s) is such a waste of time!

Each organization should have repository of information from already executed projects and these are called ‘Organizational Process Assets’. If one is not already existing, at least start creating it from now onwards. Lessons learned from earlier projects and historical information usually constitutes organization’s knowledge base, which in turn helps effective planning & execution of new project’s processes.

Organizational process assets include any or all processes related to the assets from an organization(s) involved in a project that can be used to influence the project’s success.

Process assets include (not limited to):

* Any formal/informal plans

* Organization’s standard processes, policies, procedures/methodologies,

* Guidelines,

* Lessons learned, and

* knowledge & information from historical project records and documents

Today’s project is going to be tomorrow’s history. For better tomorrow, it is the responsibility of project team members to add and/or update the organizational process assets throughout project life cycle.