benefits management

PwC found that successful companies are getting more mature in their project management ability.  This raises the game – successful companies have lower costs from fewer failed projects, and less successful companies have to work harder to catch up.  There are some important lessons to take this report for everyone – Read more…

What do you think of when you think of formal Project Management?  Do you immediately picture Gantt charts, PIDs and other pointless documentation, administration coming out of your ears?  Or do you picture a shining machine, running like clockwork, happy people all clear about what they are to do next?

You've decided to commit resources, but you want to know that you are getting value for money.  How do you do it?  It's usually estiamted that 70% of projects fail to deliver a return on investment (ie fail to deliver enough benefits to make the investment worth while)?

Benefits Management addresses this.  It's one of my specialist areas.  Here's how it works

Social Return on Investment (SROI) is used to prepare a business case, and to evaluate the success of a service or project.

SROI goes further than traditional Cost Benefit Analysis, Environmental Impact Analysis, and Treasury Green Book, to calculate (based  on robust evidence) the financial value of some of the more difficult outcomes of a service or project.  For example: (read more)

Association for Project Management (APM) Benefits Management Special Interest Group held an event last Tuesday 30 Oct 2012 on Social Return on Investment.

We've been very lucky that the event was videod and you can see the video and slides through the following links.

Please note - there are some hiccups with the technology.  

This government is promoting Infrastructure projects as the way out of the recession - they create jobs, create GDP, and leave a lasting legacy.  But is it all rosy in the garden?  Let's look at the evidence.

With a strong enough WHY you can achieve just about any HOW.  The WHY is the drive behind any initiative - what do we expect to gain from this project or programme.  But in our observation, many projects fail not because they failed to be on time and on budget, but because the deliverables have been negotiated away until they are worth less than the investment needed to get them.

Portfolio management, programme management, project management - ​Benefits management is the glue that holds these together.  

Align your programmes with your strategic objectives (do the right things); make sure your projects all contribute to the aim or aims of the programme (do things in the right way), and manage your projects (do them well).  Your projects will create capability, your programmes will deliver benefits, and these will combine to deliver value to the organisation.