Model based process assessment for public financial and physical resource management processes

The necessity of transformation for efficient and effective management of Public Financial and Physical Resource Management (PFPRM) processes has become increasingly critical in the governmental organizations. However, there is a lack of a guideline in the literature for process capability determination and improvement of PFPRM processes. ISO/IEC 15504, also termed Software Process Improvement and Capability dEtermination (SPICE), is used as a baseline to generate capability/maturity models for different specific domains/sectors, based on the observed benefits obtained in software organizations. We have developed a method for process definition and assessment based on SPICE and utilized the method for PFPRM processes. In this paper the method for developing the PFPRM process definition and for conducting process assessment is described, followed by a multiple case study in three organizations. The findings show that the proposed method is successful at identifying PFPRM process defects at different process capability levels and is capable of providing a roadmap for moving the process capability level to the next step.