Benefits Realization: Something to Think About

Michael R. Wood is a Business Process Improvement & IT Strategist Independent Consultant. He is creator of the business process-improvement methodology called HELIX and founder of The Natural Intelligence Group, a strategy, process improvement and technology consulting company. He is also a CPA, has served as an Adjunct Professor in Pepperdine's Management MBA program, an Associate Professor at California Lutheran University, and on the boards of numerous professional organizations. Mr. Wood is a sought after presenter of HELIX workshops and seminars in both the U.S. and Europe.

  Benefits Realization  

If you believe pursuing projects that align with the organization’s goals and objectives is a good thing, projects that deliver value greater than their cost, and that are focused on creating a path for the organization to achieve a predefined set of outcomes, then you should know about benefits realization management.

BRM, which is gaining popularity in Europe, is based on a principle that all operational, program and project endeavors of an organization are intended to produce outcomes that add greater value to the organization than the costs needed to produce them. And while this principle of realizing benefits (value, ROI, etc.) is a Business 101 concept (and much of the reason organizations are created in the first place), how to make that happen is often elusive and quite difficult to achieve for many organizations.

This is where BRM enters the game. BRM approaches offer a framework that organizations can follow to help yield more successful value-creating outcomes from their project investments. It joins the ranks of other value-creation and alignment approaches like business process improvement (BPI), project portfolio management (PPM) and management by objectives/results (MBO / MBR). What differentiates BRM from the field is that it focuses on realizing the benefits that projects are intended to produce; or as Wikipedia states it:

“BRM has clear …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.