How can you commit to work if you don’t know whether that work will deliver what you want? Benefits realization isn’t easy, but it’s certainly not impossible. The fundamental issue is that work—and the benefits aligned with that work—is being defined in the wrong way.
Program sponsors making investment choices certainly have benefit expectations in mind when they make those choices. The benefits register, which is created in the first step of the Program Benefits Realization model, too often leads to deterministic benefits, with no indication of the uncertainty surrounding them. What can we do?
Need a better approach to evaluating quantitative benefits? Use a statistical model and make investment choices based on outcomes that have a high likelihood of occurring. In our concluding installment, Statistical PERT comes to the rescue!
Project professionals need to acknowledge that many quantitative uncertainties are poorly estimated using simple, deterministic values that offer little insight about the uncertainty. Consider using Statistical PERT to help.
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"Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?" - Groucho Marx |
