The Money Files

Last time I wrote about the business benefits that you might want to consider for your business cases. But identification of the benefits is only the first step. The training I was putting together was an hour-long overview, so nothing really deep dive, but I wanted to cover the process for managing benefits beyond simply brainstorming the things we could list to justify the business case.

This is the process I included in my presentation.

1. Identify

This is the step covered in my last article. Define what benefits the project is expected to deliver. Consider financial, customer, operational, strategic, employee, and ESG benefits.

As well as the list I shared last time, go back to some past business cases and see what kind of things they included, as well as the level of detail expected. For example, some business cases I’ve seen are really high-level with hardly any detail and they still got approved! I think it depends on how much you have already socialised the idea and how much the exec team want to do the project… But don’t waste too much time doing the work if you don’t need to in order to get it approved. Maybe stick to two or three good quality benefits instead of listing out 15 non-quantifiable benefits instead.

2. Define and quantify

Make each benefit SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound). Where possible, quantify in financial terms or KPIs.

This is the step where you’ll spend the most time. It’s normally quite easy to work out the kinds of benefits you’ll get from the project activity. It’s really hard to agree what the baseline is and how you are going to work out the measures going forward.

3. Map and align

Link each benefit to project outputs and strategic objectives. Ensure they support organisational goals.

Do this on a slide to include in the business case or just in a paragraph. This bit doesn’t have to be too much work but you will want to evidence to the decision makers that you have thought about strategic alignment.

4. Plan for realisation

Clarify how and when each benefit will be achieved, who owns it, and what dependencies exist. Go back to step 2 – normally it’s the person who owns the baseline data who will own the ‘new’ data for the benefit. Think about when the benefit kicks in. If it’s about more sales, do they happen in the same month as you made them on the call? If customers have 60 days to pay their invoice, maybe you need to recognise the revenue 60 days later?

This step is another time-consuming one as you work out and negotiate all these pieces.

5. Track and measure

Include plans to track benefits through delivery and beyond. Does the project need to deliver a new dashboard to track sales or some other target? Add those tasks to the project plan otherwise you’ll get to the end and have no way of measuring your achievements.

6. Review and update

I wish I could have made this into 5 steps for the training because 6 doesn’t fit so nicely on a slide! But there is this final step which is to keep benefits under review. Update the business case as the project evolves or as assumptions change. This might mean going back around the approval process if the benefits are hugely different.

Hope that helps with your next business case and benefits discussions! Let me know what else you do in the comments below.

If you didn’t do it at the end of last year, now is definitely the time to acknowledge and celebrate project successes – things you did really well last year as a team. And it doesn’t matter how big they are, every small step in the right direction should be marked if you can!

Why celebrating wins is important

I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that when a senior leader recognises the work you’ve done, it has a positive impact on morale and motivation. I can’t be the only one who thinks, “Ooh, I’ll file that email away for my end of year review.” That’s what you want to create: a sense of, “they think I’ve done a good job.”

Not everyone needs to be praised all the time, but celebrating wins also helps reinforce behaviours that are positive and shows that people are watching!

The biggest challenges I hear from project managers is that there isn’t enough time to celebrate success, and they don’t know what’s worth celebrating – is it just project completion? Well, it doesn’t have to be.

Here are some examples of project-related wins:

• Finishing a project (obviously)
• Meeting key milestones
• Signing a contract with a vendor
• Overcoming a major challenge, hurdle or issue
• Taking delivery of part of the equipment required
• Starting the work (good if you are literally breaking ground or clearing out a space – take before and after photos!)

Those are all tangible achievements but there are intangible ones too, such as resolving a problem with creative thinking, innovation, collaboration (especially if you can bring virtual colleagues into this one), and so on.

You can also think of wins that are specific to a particular person, for example, marking their one year anniversary on a project, or starting or completing a relevant training course.

How to do the celebrating

This is another area where people get stuck, because (surprise, surprise) there often isn’t any budget for marking celebrations during the project (and often not a project completion either, to be honest).

If you can, put some budget aside to allow for employee recognition. If that isn’t possible, tap into any employee recognition schemes that exist within the organisation and lean on those. Call out colleagues for recognition within team meetings, send digital cards or simply an email of thanks.

Record the successes

One thing you can do is create a ‘wins report’ which will sit alongside your lessons learned report at the end of a project as a reflection of all the cool stuff you achieved and how that work was acknowledged throughout the project.

If you’re in the kind of organisation where you want to share success stories with clients when you are pitching for work, you could also use your wins report as input to those.

Starting out 2025 with a reflection on what you achieved in 2024 is a good way to generate some momentum for the first few months and help people feel good about coming back to work after the festive break! How are you going to take this idea and bring it into your meetings over the coming weeks?

We’re almost at the end of quarter 1, so it’s time to reflect on how the first 3 months of the year. Here are some suggestions on what you could be doing now.

Reflect on personal goals

Did you set personal New Year’s resolutions? I’m not a big fan of resolutions as I think we can start new habits whenever, and January is a particularly bleak time of year in this part of the world, so not necessarily the best time to be trying to do new things when all you want to do is huddle under a blanket with hot chocolate.

However, maybe you did set some personal goals for this year, or a word of the year. How are you doing with that? If you’re doing well, how are you going to maintain that momentum? And if things haven’t started out as well as you would have hoped, how are you going to make the next 3 months any different?

Reflect on professional goals

This is also a good point to reflect on professional goals, like earning a certification. I have talked to people who wanted to achieve something (like sitting an exam) and then found the year has gone by so quickly they haven’t managed to make any time for it.

If the first 3 months of this year have sped past without you making up much ground on your professional goals, take a look at how you can break those down into smaller, achievable chunks and schedule the time to do the work.

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Reflect on your objectives

The professional development and performance management process in many organisations requires setting objectives at the beginning of the year. If you have had objectives set, it might be too early to have really made much progress towards fully achieving them.

However, you can make sure that you are clear about what they are, when they have to be achieved by, and what you should be doing to complete them. For example, schedule time for any courses you need to take, or block out some time to review progress monthly. If necessary, book quarterly reviews with your manager or mentor to go through the objectives and refresh them – I recommend getting these in the diary now as people’s calendars fill up remarkably quickly.

You might find it helpful to print out your objectives so you can carry them round with you or have them pinned up next to your desk. Then you’ll be able to check in regularly and remind yourself of the progress still required.

Another thing to start doing is making a note of the actions you have completed that count towards your performance review at the end of the year. Will you really remember what you did in February when you sit down with your manager in December or January next year? Probably not. Use this time (and block out an hour in your diary once a month) to update your objectives with a progress report.

Save any nice emails or examples of evidence you can use to show that you have achieved the objectives.

Get ready for quarter 2!

Next, put some time in your diary to do the exact same exercise in 3 months, when quarter 2 comes to a close. Regular reviews are an easy way to stay on top on your objectives – or at least identify where you are not able to meet the targets, giving you the chance to put plans into action or change them before it becomes a problem.

We’ve all got metrics we use to assess project success: cycle time, earned value and so on.

As the year ends, maybe it’s time to look at some other measures we could use that might be a bit more… dare I say… interesting? Below, I’ve suggested 7 alternative metrics you could put in place (some easily, some would take more thought and set up) to look at what project performance really means in the round.

1. Customer satisfaction (CSAT)

You might find CSAT in use across other teams. Why not implement it for project management customers too? Even if you work in-house, you will have internal customers. Trust me, they have an opinion on the project management service you provide. Why not check in with them directly and ask for it?

You don’t need a formal CSAT tool. Set some survey questions and set up a form to ask stakeholders their views, and then collate the results.

2. Time to Value (TTV)

Cycle time is worth knowing, but does the end of your cycle always end in value delivered? A different way of thinking about it would be time to value: how quickly the project delivers tangible value per feature, or perhaps overall.

This metric comes with the added challenge of having to define value: but that could be a very useful exercise for stakeholders!

3. Innovation level

Could you create your own innovation index? There are already indices in use like the Global Innovation Index, but that’s probably overkill for our projects. Consider how innovative the product/deliverables are and the method used to implement them.

4. Resource utilization

Here’s one you can probably get from your project management software but I don’t see it on reports very often. What could you take from a utilization report? Metrics are only helpful if there is something you can use them for, like decision support. In this case, it would be making sure the team is adequately resourced, so you really want to be looking forward not backward. Although historical data is useful too to see if there is a trend towards over or under staffing.

5. Change adoption rate

Could you create a metric that looks at how quickly the organization is adopting new changes? If you work with a change manager, they might have some ideas about how to implement this. Any new process changes or anything that requires training could be included, even if your measure was only based on smiley faces!

6. Sustainability impact

Your procurement team might already have a sustainability index based on their work with vendors and a sustainable supply chain. If you have an energy team, they might have measures you can pull into your projects too. For example, how much carbon saving your project is creating, or how much waste is recycled from different locations.

7. Risk mitigation effectiveness

We mitigate risks, but are those actions really useful? We could draw on AI-powered insights by plugging in risk mitigation activities across a selection of risks and the outcomes. (Or you could work through this manually). I’m not sure how you’d assess the usefulness of the mitigation strategy: maybe on a scale of 1-5? Then you could see which actions had the biggest impact in reducing the risk.

There are lots of ways to measure project performance, and no one wants to be creating reports and tracking metrics for the sake of it. However, it might be worth looking at whether your current suite of metrics truly give you the complete, holistic picture of performance, because we all know it goes beyond time, cost and quality.

I have an electronic copy of the PMBOK® 7^th edition, so from time to time I open it up to check on something. Recently, I’ve been looking at different ways to forecast as we’ve got some work on that needs to be planned out.

There are 6 quantitative forecasting options called out in the Guide. These are as follows.

Estimate to complete (ETC)

This is top of the list and the one I personally use the most often. It works even if you are not in a full, compliant, earned value management environment. The risk here is that we assume past performance is indicative of future performance, and honestly, why wouldn’t you? Unless you know something is definitely going to change measurable performance, you would assume that work is going to continue at broadly the same rate. Just jot that down as an assumption so it’s transparent to everyone.

Estimate at completion (EAC)

For me, this goes hand in hand with ETC. It’s calculated by taking the actuals and adding the ETC, so again, while it comes under the umbrella of earned value acronyms, it’s completely accessible to those who don’t work in EV setting.

Variance at completion (VAC)

As forecasting tools go, this gives interesting data. It’s the measure that shows the amount of forecasted budget over or under at the end of the project, and it’s one most project sponsors will be interested in: “Will we have any cash left to do anything else when we’re finished?”

To-complete performance index (TCPI)

I have never had the opportunity (or reason) to use this forecasting metric. Perfect for those of you working with earned value day in, day out, it’s the cost performance required to meet whatever management target you’ve set for the work. It’s a ratio, so I think it is less meaningful to execs who are used to see tangible numbers of days or money.

Regression analysis

Now more and more tools are introducing AI features, it is possible to access regression analysis more easily. Perhaps you’ve got access to an AI-powered tool that will crunch these numbers for your automatically, removing the need for statistical knowledge.

The output allows you to predict performance going forward based on what has happened in the past, so it’s arguably more grounded than other guesstimates!

Throughput analysis

The final forecasting technique mentioned is throughput analysis. This looks at the number of items completed in a fixed time, so it’s useful for teams measuring features completed, velocity and story points. You can compare the output to those of other teams, although I’d be wary about comparing teams unless they work on very similar products or services. It wouldn’t be fair to judge a team on their throughput when dealing with very complex features against the performance of a team that has higher throughput but lower complexity.

However, the team can compare its performance against itself: that would be a worthwhile exercise. Ideally, you’d want to see that the learnings from retros have been fully incorporated and, more importantly, that the changes have actually made a difference.

Which of these are most used for your project forecasting? Let us know in the comments below!