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

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.

Benefits Management has moved from an art, practiced by wizards (and I was one), to a science that is repeatable and consistent, and that can be used as a reliable basis for decision making both during the programme or project, and during operation or service delivery.

It needs a governing body, and I believe the APM is the right governing body to bring together the world experts and hudreds of years' of experience, to make Benefits management better for everyone.

Follow my argument and make your own comments . . .

Prof Stephen Carver illustrates the complexity of project management in his inimitable style, when he describes the Battle of Britain.

Projects are like flying individual aeroplanes, Programmes like an airport conning tower or squadron, and the Portfolio is like air traffic control for the whole country or continent.

A competitive environment is like war, and internal projects are like commercial flights - they still need to take account of everything else going on.  The video is 15 minutes and explains it in part.

APM (Association for Project Management) released its second Thought Leadership Guide on Benefits Management.
It's entitled Delivering benefits from investment in change - creating organisational capability, and it describes how to make the next step from Strategy into capability.

This guide is the second of a series of four, pitched at a strategic level, on how to make Benefits Management actually work.  And its authors embody many decades of experience between them.

How is a project like a war?  Well, there's the politics, of course.  and the unexpected, and the different characters who plan / command / just do it / run away.  There's the rich embroidery of different parts of the project coming together to produce something beautiful.

I went to an Association of Project Managers' meeting by the North East branch, where one of my favourite speakers Stephen Carver (of Cranfield University) used the Battle of Hastings to illustrate.  Read more . . .

And I thought you'd never ask. People haven’t really come up with a standard for benefits management, so it is easy to get caught up filling in endless forms and documents.  But as I said in the last post, you can make PRINCE2 very simple so that it works for you, and you can do the same with Benefits Management.

Benefits management is a very simple, common sense, thing to do.  We do it all the time, subconsciously, usually very well, and sometimes badly.

So how can you do it well?