5 Routes to Benefit Realisation

With PRINCE2 it’s easy; once the products are delivered the project can be closed down, and even before the Project Evaluation Review is complete, the project team can disappear to the pub and celebrate another project in the bag.

The project may have been successfully delivered, but how can we ensure that the benefits will be realised. Here are five routes to benefit realisation, and surprise surprise, benefit realisation does not start when the project ends.

1. Start with the Benefits in Mind

Yes Stephen Covey got it right when he advocated beginning with the end in mind, as one of his Seven Habits of Highly Successful People. So it is with benefits. At the requirements stage or even before; dream a little: we want the project to deliver this, so that we can do this, so that we can achieve this. It is important to ensure that right from the start there is clarity, about how project outcomes are designed to deliver project benefits.

2. Ditch the Business Case

The Business Case is designed to justify the project, but too often towards the end of the project, the dusty document is retrieved to “see what the benefits were”. The benefits are the project, and should guide the process from beginning to end, whereas the Business Case is just a means to an end.

3. Tipping Point

A project should have three phases:

- Delivery of Outcomes
- Building Capability
- Realising Benefits

The delivery of products / stuff / outcomes should be the focus at the start of any project, but about mid way there is a tipping point, and the focus changes to how the benefits will be achieved. Each phase requires different disciplines, people, and management, but it is important that managing the present, morphs seamlessly into creating the future.

4. Get Out of the Comfort Zone

There is a view especially when delivering IT projects, that the IT project manager delivers the project (i.e. the delivery of outcomes) but the business is responsible for building capability and realising benefits. CIOs complain that they are too often sidelined by the business, but they do not always have the balls to get out of their comfort zone and declare that: “we have taken the project this far, now give us have responsibility for the business change”. After all it makes sense, benefits realisation requires meticulous planning, exceptional stakeholder management, and exemplary risk and issue management. The best and most experienced programme and project managers are usually in IT. (Discuss!)

5. Nail the Sponsor

Not wanting to cast aspersions, but some Senior Management are more keen to be at the start of a project than they are to be there at the end. Keep the sponsor committed and involved, clear strategic direction is required to turn project delivery into change.