The Money Files

Recently a colleague asked me to do some training on business case benefits – how to identify them, manage them and track them. We spent a lot of the time thinking about different types of benefits, and I thought the list we brainstormed might be useful to you too.

Why not copy/paste this list or bookmark it so that next time you are creating a business case you can review whether you’re going to get any of these types of benefits?

1. Financial Benefits

Let’s start with the obvious ones, and the ones most execs, in my experience, tend to care about the most – the money benefits. You might have:

• Increased revenue (e.g. from new products or markets)
• Improved EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation)
• Cost savings (e.g. from process efficiencies or automation)
• Avoided costs (e.g. preventing fines, reducing waste, or legacy system support)
• Improved cash flow or working capital efficiency

Working capital efficiency benefits were only something I came across on a project last year. While they might not make such great headlines as increasing revenue, they are definitely something you should be looking at if you have the opportunity.

2. Customer Benefits

Next up, benefits to your customers.

• Improved Net Promoter Score (NPS) or whatever measure you use to track customer satisfaction
• Reduced customer complaints or complaints about not-so-serious things
• Faster response/resolution times
• Enhanced customer experience (e.g. self-service tools, more intuitive systems)
• Increased customer retention or loyalty

3. Operational/Process Benefits

Next, we looked at internal benefits.

• Faster cycle times or reduced lead times
• Better data quality
• Improved productivity or throughput
• Standardisation or simplification of processes
• Increased system uptime or availability
• Improved compliance with regulations or standards

Some of these will translate into a financial benefit, for example, if you reduce the time it takes to answer a customer service call, you’d expect an agent to be able to do more calls in a day. Each call might turn into a sale, so there is the potential for increased revenue as a result of more calls answered. That kind of thing. You then start getting into the realms of assumptions – we assume 50% of calls convert to a sale, or something like that. I’d lean on your finance team or business planning and forecasting team here rather than try to guess at what the right assumptions might be.

There’s no reason not to include process benefits – they are easy to track for the most part – but if you can convert them to money benefits you might find your business case stacks up better.

4. Strategic Benefits

Personally, I think the strategic benefits are a bit vague. These are the kind of benefits you’d list in the exec summary to convince people of strategic alignment and the overall  ‘goodness’ of the business case, but you wouldn’t necessarily put them in a financial model.

• Entry into new markets or segments
• Support for strategic goals or transformation
• Improved agility or responsiveness to change
• Future-proofing the organisation (e.g. through technology upgrades)

5. Employee and Organisational Benefits

Benefits to staff often use similar measures to the customer service metrics, so if you can reuse any calculations, assumptions of measurement methods, then that will save you time.

• Improved staff engagement or morale from staff satisfaction surveys. Best to make these the ‘official’ surveys but you could also do ad hoc surveys before and after your project goes live to assess the difference
• Increased staff retention
• Better tools or systems for employees
• Upskilling or capability building
• Reduced manual work or rework

Get your HR team involved in measuring and tracking people-related benefits as they probably have access to a lot more data than you will about turnover, retention and so on.

6. Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) Benefits

Even if you think your project might not have any benefits that fall into the corporate/social responsibility or ESG category, spend a few minutes thinking about them as you might find something.

• Carbon footprint reduction
• Waste reduction
• Improved sustainability reporting
• Better ethical or diversity practices
• Community or social impact

These are pretty hard to track in my experience. Waste reduction and recycling not so much as you can measure what you throw away, but carbon reporting can get quite complicated, especially if you don’t have someone in your organisation who is responsible for this.

7. Risk Reduction/Avoidance

Finally, we talked about the benefits of reducing (or avoiding) risks, including:

• Reduced operational risk (e.g. from old systems, manual processes)
• Improved data security or resilience
• Better business continuity or disaster recovery

Which of these could you use in your business cases?

Last month I looked at some of the basics for data privacy on projects. Let’s go into that in a bit more depth this month, by looking at some of the project tasks you can schedule to help manage data on your project within the regulations of your country, whatever they are.

1. Data mapping

The first activity you can schedule is data mapping. You might already have a customer journey or user flows or process maps. Can you add a swimlane for data on that? Or if necessary, create a new data map.

The data mapping exercise should help you understand where, how, and why data is being collected throughout the project lifecycle and beyond.

2. Data Processing Agreements (DPAs)

Another task is creating DPAs with the relevant parties for your project. This is normally something you’d do as you contract with a third party, so lean into the legal or procurement team for support.

A DPA is a document that outlines how data will be handled, stored, and protected. There is probably a template within your organisation already.

Alternatively, the task is to check that DPAs are already in place, if the vendor is one that you use regularly. I like the kind of tasks that can easily be checked off! They help the team feel they are making progress and ensure that you are putting compliance at the forefront of your processes.

3. Due diligence

Schedule time to conduct due diligence on third-party tools and vendors to ensure their privacy and security measures meet your organisation’s data protection requirements. You probably won’t be doing the actual due diligence, so talk to your procurement or legal teams, or the data protection officer to find out how this will happen.

Again, if your company already has a relationship with the third-party, the task here is to check that it was done at some point and does not need to be done again.

4. Data security and risk mitigation

Make sure there are activities on the schedule that involve implementing strong security measures to protect project data. That could include setting up multi-factor authentication, data encryption, and secure access protocols.

Generally, the IT team would have to take responsibility for doing these things or checking that they are already in place from a third party. Talk to them about the kinds of tasks that need to go on the schedule so they have enough time to put security measures live before the project launches.

5. Testing

Make time for data testing. For example, schedule penetration testing. Look through your risk register for risks related to data breaches or leaks and have mitigation strategies in place that you can test out. That might be checking you can restore from back up or testing security protocols for data access.

Again, talk to your technical teams about what this might look like for your projects and put the time in for this work so it doesn’t get squeezed in at the last minute or forgotten about.

All of these scheduleable (is that a word?) tasks will help you address any risks or issues relating to non-compliance and show that you are actively prioritising data privacy. Next time I’m going to look at training teams on data privacy best practices. Meanwhile, why not share your experiences of data on your projects in the comments below? Thanks!

Risk avoidance is an approach that you’ll see mentioned as one way to manage project risk. But how can you actually avoid a risk? Oftentimes, the risks are related to what the project is all about and you can’t simply palm them off on to someone else or change the project so that they don’t happen – because that would mean changing the scope of the project and that’s probably not going to be something your sponsor will go for.

In his book, Identifying and Managing Project Risk (4^th edition), Tom Kendrick lays out some realistic options to consider if you want to avoid a risk completely.

Here are some suggestions drawn from his work but with my own interpretation added in.

Avoid new technology

Anything new brings with it an element of risk. Untried technology might be the latest shiny thing, but if you want to avoid risks related to using unique, new, and unproven solutions, it’s better to stick to the tried-and-tested options.

Buy, don’t build

Make or buy decisions are common in tech projects and others. You have to decide if you’re going to buy in a solution or build it in-house. It might feel like the right thing to do is to build it in house, but if someone out there already has a proven solution that works and would work for you, you can reduce the risk if you go with that.

Building involves creating something new (for you) so it adds time and uncertainty and risk.

Do the minimum

Keep your scope small. The larger the scope, or the more additional change requests and new features that find their way into the brief, the more risk you are adding. MVP for the win.

Keep the plan simple

Along the same lines as having a simple product scope, have a simple plan. Avoid multiple strands of work that run in sequence. Avoid dependencies between tasks where you can. Break down tasks into smaller chunks of work and make sure there are enough people to manage them. Schedule ‘fire breaks’ where the team can catch up.

Manage resources

Look at where you can build in more time, or more slack, for example by not having someone due to work on two back-to-back tasks and making sure people are scheduled at a lower level of availability over resource-pressured times like holiday seasons. Even better, ring-fence the resource so they are solely dedicated to your project and aren’t trying to juggle their day job or other project commitments at the same time. Use resource levelling to spot where you might have problems and plan around those.

Make sure there are enough people available with the right skills so you can avoid the bus factor. Give people the tools they need to get their work done so they aren’t slowed down by not having access to the right kit or software and automate what you can so they don’t have to do those tasks at all.

If you want to avoid risks completely, you will have to think about how you plan and resource the work. Review how you prioritise requirements or look at the schedule. Think about how work can be rearranged between people or across the timeline to reduce the risk to nothing.

It might not be possible – in fact, I’d bet it isn’t possible – to avoid every risk, because that’s the nature of projects. But there could be some specific schedule, resource or scope risks that you could remove from your log because of the choices you and the team make.

What else would you add to this list? Let me know in the comments!

There’s a resource risk that should be on your project risk register, regardless of the type of project you are doing. That’s your bus factor. In other words, what risks are you running if a key resource is hit by a bus.

Yes, it’s a bit morbid (use “won the lottery and quit without notice” if you want a discussion point with less dying) but it’s a crucial issue for projects.

The resource doesn’t literally have to be hit by a bus (and let’s hope that they are not). What we’re talking about it is the impact of them not being on the team for a length of time, often with hardly any notice. For example, going off sick, deciding to take another job and HR putting them on gardening leave, needing time to care for a relative or some other absence.

The trouble with project teams is that we don’t normally have a lot of spare resources lying around. People are subject matter experts and you get one of those skilled experts allocated to your team based on need. It’s unlikely that you have a pool of multiskilled people who can step in if someone else is off work for a length of time…sometimes that might be the case, but even if the skills are available, the person who has them might be fully allocated to another project or even – gasp! – doing their day job.

Building resilience into the team is important, but in my experience it’s not often as easy as it sounds. Yes, we cross-skill team members where it makes sense. Yes, I cover for other project managers when they are on holiday for a week. But some tasks need The Person With The Skills and you have to wait for them to come back.

So, now we understand the risk that the bus factor brings to projects, what can you do about it?

First, highlight it in the risk register if you haven’t already. This improves visibility and lets senior managers know it’s a risk you’re carrying.

Next, talk to the team. They can’t predict this kind of ‘bus’ absence but you can get caught out by other types of absence. I once worked on a project where the key functional owner told me that she was on holiday for a fortnight during the project call before she went away. She had tasks scheduled for her to be doing while she was off. Her line manager hadn’t let me know, and to be fair to her, I hadn’t asked her either.

From then on, we regularly asked project team members when their upcoming holidays were, because you can’t always rely on them or their managers to let you know. Especially if the holiday is booked after the project schedule has been put together.

Talking to the team serves another purpose: it can help you identify what you can proactively do to offset the bus risk. For example, workshadowing, setting up a delegate with an account so two people have access to crucial systems, sending two people on training courses instead of one and so on.

Sketchplanations highlights the challenge in the image below. It’s up to you to make sure you’ve put enough measures in place to make sure your project isn’t delayed by unforeseen lack of resource.

I was inspired to do the Generative AI for Project Managers course (which is currently free, and definitely worth looking at on the PMI website) and from there, to sign up for a ChatGPT account. In parallel to that, I was asked to deliver a webinar on AI-proofing your career (spoiler alert: AI takes away the parts of the job that I didn’t like so much anyway, and frees up more time for you to shine in human relationships), so I seem to have embedded myself in the world of AI recently!

I thought I would put ChatGPT to the test by asking it a question I get asked frequently:

What are the top 5 challenges affecting project managers in the world today?

This is an edited version of what it said. It gave me 246 words, and I’ve added my own thoughts after each point to add a human-in-loop spin on the feedback. The GenAI course explains human-in-loop if you have not come across this term before.

(Sidenote: I feel weird calling it ‘it’ when you can have a conversation with it. I think I would like to give my ChatGPT bot a name, I just don’t know what!)

As of my last knowledge update in September 2021, the following were some of the top challenges affecting project managers worldwide:

1. Resource Constraints:
   • Limited availability of skilled resources, both in terms of human capital and specialized tools or technologies, can significantly impact project timelines and deliverables.

Elizabeth says: So far so good. This seems to be a perennial problem across the ages. It’s not particularly new, but I’m sure it is true. Every project manager I speak to seems to have issues with resourcing and capacity planning.

2. Scope Creep and Change Management:
   • Managing changes to project scope and requirements can be a major challenge.

Elizabeth says: Again, this is not new news. It’s not the modern, fresh take I was hoping for. Perhaps there isn’t one: we’re stuck with the challenge we’ve always had, which is reassuring and disappointing at the same time!

3. Remote and Distributed Teams:
   • The shift to remote work, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, has posed challenges in team collaboration, communication, and ensuring productivity across geographically dispersed team members.

Elizabeth says: I’m sensing a theme here. These are all true, but as project managers, we’ve been overcoming the challenge of remote and distributed teams for years, even before the pandemic.

4. Risk Management and Uncertainty:
   • Identifying, assessing, and mitigating risks is critical to project success.

Elizabeth says: I agree that risk management and working in uncertainty is a challenge, but we have whole project approaches designed to minimise the impact of that and maximise user engagement through short deliverable sprints. Yes, the world is an uncertain place, but again, project managers have been looking out for the things that will bite us in the backside for years. That’s the job!

5. Stakeholder Management:
   • Balancing the needs and expectations of various stakeholders, including clients, sponsors, team members, and end-users, is crucial.

Elizabeth says: I would not have put stakeholder management as one of the challenges for project managers. In fact, it’s one of the fun parts! I do understand that it is challenging to manage competing priorities, but again, our processes are set up to identify those and work through them.

Then ChatGPT goes on to add:

Please note that the landscape of project management may have evolved since my last knowledge update. Factors like emerging technologies, evolving business models, and global events (such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic) can introduce new challenges or shift the emphasis on existing ones. It's recommended to stay updated with current industry reports, trends, and insights to understand the most pressing challenges faced by project managers in 2023.

Elizabeth says: I agree that it is important to stay up to date with the pressing challenges, and the best way to do that is to stay connected to the industry. Conferences like the PMI Summit and publications like project management magazines provide timely insights into what is important. For example, sustainability isn’t on the ChatGPT list and I would have thought that would have been a concern back in 2021.

I haven’t yet paid for an upgraded account, so perhaps a paid account would have better outcomes and give me a different take on what the current challenges are, so there’s that to consider.

Meanwhile, I’m curious! Do you agree with these challenges? Do you think there are others more pressing for us as project managers? And what do you think of the output of ChatGPT if you’ve used it? Let me know in the comments below!