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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.
A project is only successful if it brings benefits to the organization or the client. But how do you measure the benefits during the project lifecycle?
Benefits management is slowly becoming a more important part of project selection and execution, but there are still too many inconsistencies in how projected benefits are calculated. Here are two of the common ones.
A project is only useful if it produces benefits to the organization or client. The project manager and project team should be prepared to track those benefits during the project lifecycle. Here we provide some things to keep in mind.
The key contributor to project success will be the willingness of you and your organization to move the focus from the traditional three-legged stool to one that encompass both benefits realization and change management. This is a significant paradigm shift, but can pay huge dividends.
Through the efforts of benefits management, projects are kept accountable to the needs they are designed to support. Without the persistent review of a project to keep it focused on its original goal, there may be circumstances where what was delivered is a far cry from what was expected.
Everything that you thought you knew will soon be wrong. Are you prepared for that? Project managers rarely give benefits a second thought. This needs to change, and in the near future it will change with an increasing focus on project management that prioritizes business benefits over arbitrary constraint compliance.
| A. | Benefits management is now often asked of the project manager, but you should position yourself as the process facilitator, not the “responsible party”. Otherwise, they’ll blame you if the project benefits aren’t realized. |
| B. | Benefits management has to do with salary, union contracts, insurance, 401K plans, sexual harassment concerns and training classes. It is rightly positioned in the human resources department, not in a project environment. |
| C. | Since the outcome of your project is the sole indicator of whether or not the business objective will produce revenue, tracking benefits realization logically fits into the responsibility of the project manager. |
| D. | Tracking benefits management is a time inhibitor in a project plan. For that reason, if your project is to finish as estimated, benefits management should be outsourced to a third-party organization. |
How does your organization ensure that benefits realization occurs? For so many projects, there is never any measurement of whether projected gains were actually achieved. In this article, we look at how the PMO can assist in improving that situation.
Defining project success seems simple--achieve the triple constraint and then a project is successful. Or is it? This article features a principal customer engineer for a semiconductor foundry and a university deputy director discussing how to measure success on projects.
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A tree never hits an automobile except in self defense. |
