What are Organizational Process Assets and Enterprise Environmental Factors?

“Organizational process assets” and “enterprise environmental factors” are terms you might come across in project management circles or resources, or while studying for your PMP.

These are fancy terms for fairly straightforward concepts. Let’s break down what they mean and look at how these assets and factors influence real projects.

What are Organizational Process Assets?

Both the PMBOK® Guide—Sixth Edition and the PMBOK® Guide—Seventh Edition from PMI define organizational process assets this way:

“Plans, processes, policies, procedures, and knowledge bases that are specific to and used by the performing organization.”

The PMBOK® Guide—Sixth Edition also clarifies that “these assets influence the management of the project.”

I find the term that comes closest to describing all OPAs is information—information owned by your organization that influences how its projects run. This information could be stored in the form of a document, a graphic, or a video. It could live inside a software program, or it could potentially be something like an agreed-upon process that lives in the heads of employees without being written down. But if it is information, it is owned by or specific to your organization, and it affects projects, it is probably an OPA.

Examples of OPAs include a project schedule, a project charter template, a contracting policy, a request process for social media graphics, or a lessons learned database.

What are Enterprise Environmental Factors?

Both the PMBOK® Guide—Sixth Edition and the PMBOK® Guide—Seventh Edition define enterprise environmental factors this way:

“Conditions, not under the control of the team, that influence, constrain, or direct the project, program, or portfolio.”

“Team” here generally means project team. Enterprise environmental factors (or EEFs) include anything about your broader organization, or about the environment around your organization (its markets, the laws of the country where it operates, etc.) that is likely to impact your project, and your project is not likely to impact much in return.

The important truth about EEFs is that if your project team and project plans don’t acknowledge, plan around, or work within EEFs, EEFs are likely to severely hinder your project or prevent it from succeeding at all.

Examples of EEFs include your customers’ favorite social media platforms, machinery your company owns, availability of external talent with a specific skill you need, major world events, or partnerships your company has with other companies.

Is it an OPA or an EEF?

When preparing for the PMP, you’ll likely find yourself needing to distinguish between OPAs and EEFs.

An easy mistake is to assume OPAs exist within your organization, and EEFs exist outside of it. This is not quite true. OPAs are always internal, but EEFs can be internal or external. It is more accurate to think of OPAs as information about projects or directly about the work or deliverables your projects require. Internal EEFs are not directly about projects, but can still impact them, such as employee policies or standard email software.

It might also be easy to assume that the project team can always influence OPAs, and never influence EEFs. This is not quite true either. The project team will almost never influence an EEF, but also, they can generally only influence some OPAs. They have most influence over information generated by their projects (project plans, change logs, etc.). Other OPAs—especially policies—will be harder for them to change.

If you want more examples of OPAs and EEFs to further clarify the distinction in your mind, the PMBOK® Guide—Sixth Edition has dozens of examples of each.

Using OPAs and EEFs on Real Projects

But when it comes to navigating OPAs and EEFs on real projects, distinguishing between them is not your most important task. Whether you think of them separately or not, you need to be aware of both and use both.

As you do, the following mindsets will give you an edge.

Learning them and planning for them takes creativity.

How do you discover the OPAs and EEFs that will affect your project? At a very large company, partial lists may exist, but rarely will full lists be handed to you.

Instead, expect to go through a very non-linear process of asking questions of many different people, doing your own research, holding brainstorming sessions, drafting lists, getting feedback, and redrafting lists. If you’ve gathered project requirements before, the process will feel similar. Also, expect to use both your traditional intelligence (IQ) and your emotional intelligence (EQ) in this process to elicit the all the right information from your stakeholders—some people will not be forthcoming about what they know.

Once you’ve gathered your lists of OPAs and EEFs, then you’ll need to figure out what to do with each item. Should it affect the design of project deliverables? Should it affect how the project runs? Should it be added to the risk register and have contingency plans developed around it? The items on your lists could affect almost any aspect of your project.

Gathering and addressing OPAs and EEFs is really the art of taking the chaos around your project and defining it in an orderly way, so that you can plan for project results that will makes sense in the world into which you’re releasing them.

It isn’t easy. But it's a place where a project leader is particularly poised to add value.

Don’t underestimate your influence in the right situation.

I pointed out earlier that it is rare for a project team to influence an EEF, and they can only influence some OPAs. That being said, when OPAs or EEFs represent obstacles to project success and you are looking for creative solutions, don’t sell yourself short in terms of how much influence you might be able to have.

You have your own sphere of influence, but what important, influential people formally sponsor your project—or informally care a lot about it? Could you talk to one of those people and persuade them to change an OPA, or maybe even have a small effect on an EEF, that is giving your project trouble? If the project really matters, think big in terms of who you might get onboard to help.

And alas, if you can’t improve the OPA or EEF for your project today, can you start a longer journey to reshape the asset or factor, and create a better environment for projects of tomorrow? This would be a powerful contribution to project management and the project leaders who come after you.

I hope you now have a grasp of OPAs and EEFs, and how to creatively interact with them on your projects. The more you know about what could impact your project, the more opportunity you have to make your project results really shine.