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Categories: benefits
Last month I looked at the 5 questions to ask during benefits identification, based on information from the latest PMI Pulse report into benefits realisation.
This month I want to look at what happens next. You’ve asked those questions and got some vague but helpful answers. How do you turn them into concrete documentation that explains the project’s benefits to everyone concerned?
Luckily, the Pulse report has the answers in the form of 5 activities to do which help you define your benefits.
I’ve listed them below, along with my interpretation of what this means and how you could potentially incorporate the tasks into your project plan.
1. Defining the objectives and critical success factors
This is the same as you would do for any project, so I don’t think that you’ll need any special help here. You should set the objectives for your project and make sure that you understand how success will be measured in the eyes of the stakeholders.
Schedule the work: Set up some workshops with the right people to ensure that everyone is on the same page about the project vision. Document it and refer to it often.
2. Recognising and quantifying business benefits
In 40% of projects, the Pulse report states that this responsibility falls to the functional area VP or Director who could realistically be acting as the sponsor. Now you know the overall objectives for the project you need to think about how these translate into benefits for the organisation. You also need to know how they are going to be measured, or in what way you could assess whether you have actually achieved the stated benefits.
Schedule the work: Talk to the person or group responsible for the identification of benefits and get their views on what these should be. Start a conversation with your team about how you could build in deliverables that make benefits tracking easier.
3. Developing meaningful metrics and key performance indicators to measure the actual delivery of benefits and planned benefits
Turn those measures into a dashboard or concrete, measurable output that means something to the team and the people who are looking at it.
Schedule the work: Create a work package or work breakdown structure entry that reflects the work you have to do in order to build a mechanism for developing the metric. This could be as easy as creating new report, or it might take a lot longer and a lot more thought. Make sure you know who will be using this report (or whatever) so that you can get them to test it, and schedule in the testing activity too.
Remember that in order to see and measure a change in result, you have to have a baseline. That will probably involve doing measurement of the current state of affairs e.g. cycle time, to see if it changes in line with your expectation for benefits once the project has completed.
4. Establishing processes for measuring progress against benefits plan
You’ve got your baseline and your way of tracking, but when are you going to see those benefits and how much are you expecting at any one time? You can also think about when you are going to stop measuring the benefits – for example, you could take the benefit in this financial year and then not track it next year, considering it a business-as-usual situation by then.
Define a process – weekly, monthly? As part of that, cover off who is going to be the process owner and who is doing the work.
Schedule the work: Make sure that you have clarity about who is going to do the measuring. If it’s your project team, add time and tasks to their workload to allow for this, along with a plan for how you are going to hand this over to someone else once the project completes.
You’ll need a benefits plan to track against, so write or get one of those.
5. Creating a communications plan necessary to record progress and report to stakeholders
I don’t think it is worth having a separate plan for this as you could find that some of your comms activities are then in conflict. It’s definitely worth including benefits messaging in your normal project comms work too, so that a much wider audience gets to hear about all the great results that your project is getting.
Schedule the work: Put benefits identification and realisation communication tasks in your normal communications plan.
Hopefully this gives you some idea of the kind of work that goes into identifying benefits. It’s not rocket science but it can be time-consuming, especially if you haven’t had much experience as a company of thinking in a benefits-led way before.
Take the time and do it right, and you’ll get much better project results overall!
Read the whole report here: http://www.pmi.org/learning/pulse.aspx
Posted on: June 20, 2016 12:00 AM |
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