Benefits Realization and the PMO

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Benefits Realization   Governance   PMO   Portfolio Management   Strategy  

I have always felt that one of the hurdles to effective benefits realization was the fact that it happened after the project was completed. I know that benefits have to be realized after the project, but here’s what I mean…

During project execution, an initiative has a lot of governance oversight from a number of different business areas--client groups, sponsor groups, the PMO, etc. In addition, projects underway are part of a number of different dashboards that are regularly reviewed by a number of different areas.

Once the deliverables have been completed and handed off to the customer group, most of that oversight disappears--and certainly the formal structure of the oversight is removed. Sponsor--and especially customer--groups will still be monitoring performance and hopefully managing the benefit attainment process. But in most organizations, this is “just” part of normal operations; it’s far less visible outside of those groups.

In recent years, organizations have tried to add a finance department element to benefits tracking for major initiatives, but this isn’t so much a management role as it is an after-the-fact measurement and reporting role. Finance will report revenue growth and/or cost reduction numbers--and potentially even be able to code those changes to specific projects--but there is no attempt to drive greater …

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