What are Organizational Process Assets?
According to PMBOK (5th Edition), Organizational Process Assets (OPA) are plans, processes, procedures and knowledge bases specific to a particular organization. Any artifact (formal or informal plans), practice (processes, policies, procedures), any knowledge base (lessons learned, historical information) from any stakeholder group can be included as an organizational process asset to govern or drive projects. Among the project knowledge areas, these process assets are considered as inputs to project activities and they are updated throughout the project life cycle whenever needed and necessary.
The organizational process assets are separated under 2 categories.
- Processes and Procedures
- Corporate Knowledge Base
Under processes and procedures, the organizational process assets are categorized as follows.
| Initiation and Planning | Executing, Monitoring and Controlling | Closing |
| 1. Guidelines and specific criteria for a given project 2. Standards and Policies (HR Policies, health and safety, quality policies, etc…) 3. Procedures (Process audits, checklists, KPIs, etc…) 4. Templates (WBS, Risk register, contract templates, etc…) |
1. Change control procedures 2. Financial documents 3. Quality, issues and defects related procedures 4. Communication related documents |
1. Project closure reports 2. Project closure guidelines 3. Lessons learned documents |
Corporate Knowledge Base consists of organizational process assets which includes various types of information related to projects that can be used for any project activity. Few of them are as follows; (Source: PMBOK 5th Edition)
- Financial related databases (costing, budgeting, profits, cost overruns, hourly rates, labor hours / rates, etc…)
- Quality related databases (detected defects, controlling / limiting information, defect status, action item list, etc…)
- Configuration management related info: (baselines, policies, procedures, standards, etc…)
- Lessons learned and historical knowledge base (previous project records, project documents, contract documents, project performance related information, other knowledge areas related documents such as risk management, stakeholder management, communication management, etc…)
- Project files (Scope, schedule, cost baselines, network diagrams, risk registers, change management processes, risk response strategies, etc…)
- Process measurement related knowledge database